Adventures in Investing With Honey #1

  The following is a post by my honey, I wanted him to share his adventures in investing with you guys. It’s amazing how much of a shift there has been towards his attitude with money. This is his first real post ever, so please show him some love, he’s a great guy. :-)

I’ve recently started spending all my spare time researching various types of investing. It all started when a coworker gave me “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Making Money on Wall Street.” The stock market is something I’ve always wondered about but have always ignored. I read through that book in about 2 days, although it was a bit out dated, I was hooked!

Soon after finishing the first book, he gave me “Rich Dad Poor Dad.” Although I don’t agree with everything he said, especially about real estate (book came out in ’97 or ’98), still OMG! The information in his book is about: budgeting, recognizing the difference between an asset and a liability, knowing how to make your money work for you, and really understanding how easy it is for the rich to keep getting richer. Something in my little brain clicked..I’ve wasted so much time and money!! All those trips to the casino’s (here and here), my $2,000 set of golf clubs that is only worth about $400 now (BTW Callaway rocks!). Just a bunch of toys lying around the house not getting used, depreciating in value, money thrown away in a vain hope of hitting the jackpot. When all this time, each of those little dollars could be out there working for me, instead of me working for them. I have never felt so guilty for the way I’ve squandered money.

I decided I needed something a bit more current. Those last two books were awesome but they were both written before the last big market crash, so I got “Stock Investing For Dummies.”  I’ve been learning and studying as much as I can about: stocks, mutual funds, and the economy. I found out we are losing money in our savings accounts! Yep, that’s right..interest rates on savings accounts are only around 1% but the current rate of inflation is closer to 3%. That means that money just sitting in the bank is really, just loosing value. NOOOO!! It only gets worse from there. I always figured; put money into a 401k, start early, let it grow and everything will be okay, right?…wrong!!

If you look at a graph of the market that spans the last few years, you’ll see what looks like a line graph version of Hells Canyon right around March of 2009. Now, guess who’s money disappeared when the market crashed—Mine! Yours! Not the guys on wall street (not the smart ones anyway). All of the working class who pool their money into mutual accounts, people who were sleeping soundly at night “knowing” that their money was safe in their retirement funds. Those who studied the economy and paid attention to our country’s frivolous spending did just fine, while the rest of us woke up and realized that tens of thousands (or more) of our invested dollars had disappeared.

To prevent this from happening again, I’ve begun studying the books below, learning anything and everything I can to get started with my adventures in investing.

One Up On Wall Street : How To Use What You Already Know To Make Money In The Market
Secrets in Plain Sight: Business & Investing Secrets of Warren Buffett
The Intelligent Investor: The Definitive Book on Value Investing

Lucky for me, my wonderful wife, has already done what these guys suggest doing before you get started buying stocks. Get your spending under control and learn to manage your money. Pay off most of your debt, like our evil credit card (get rid of that interest), and build up an emergency fund. You need to have money set aside first so you’re not selling off your investments every time something comes up and you need cash.

So hopefully sometime in the near future my wife will have something new to add to our net worth. I have a bit more homework to do before I get started. I want to make sure I understand as much as possible before I do, so I can limit our risk as much as possible. I know there are a lot of people out there who would love to start investing in the stock market but are too afraid to try it. Maybe because they, like myself, just never bothered to learn. Or they hear too many people say “It’s too risky” so they never try. But think of it this way. “Driving is risky, but that does not mean you have to be a risky driver. (I really can’t remember where I heard that, just really liked that analogy) Do your homework, learn the laws, and start slow. You will minimize your risk. The stock market is the same way.”

Hopefully I’ll have the opportunity to share with you some of my successes or even failures after I get started. Until then, please leave comments or questions. If there are some of you that are market regulars, I would love the help. If you are new to the market and want to learn more, feel free to ask questions. I’ve always thought the best way to learn is to teach, so I will try my best to help you along. I unfortunately do still have to work full time so I apologize ahead of time if I’m slow at returning comments or questions. So maybe if someone has a question and someone else has the answer, feel free to answer! We can all learn together and hopefully work our way to having the financial freedom we all deserve.

About Jen Perkins

Likes: saving money, being debt free (aside from our house), zombies, travel, getting money, blogging and dogs. Dislikes: debt, being broke, bunnies, wasting money, not having enough money to travel the world and paying interest. Facebook  ♥  Twitter  ♥  Google+  ♥  RSS

Comments

Adventures in Investing With Honey #1 — 16 Comments

  1. Thank you, Mr. Honey! I look forward to reading your posts and learning what you are learning…same as I look forward to reading Jen’s posts everyday. You guys are awesome :)

    • Thanks for reading Kelly. I hope to have another post soon. I’ve just opened a Scottrade account and am following a couple different companies very closely, so hopefully I’ll have some good news to report when you hear from me again. :)

  2. Great job! It’s nice to read what the other half has to say. These sound like some books I need to check out.

    • Thank you :) It’s weird writing something that a bunch of people will be reading. I was actually really nervous about writing something for my wife to post. If you’re interested in the stock market, or investing in general, you should definitely read anything by Peter Lynch or Warren Buffet, Their like the Michael Jordan or Tiger Woods of the stock market. My philosophy in life is “Never listen to anyone who isn’t doing better than you, so why not learn from the best.”

  3. Congrats on your first post and on your venture into the stock market. Have you considered finding some good stock investing blogs to follow? When you read a book, they are just pushing their own personal strategies. With a blog, you’ll get analysis of those strategies and input from other investors.

    • Yeah, I’ve been looking around trying to learn from as many different sources as possible. Regardless of what I’m studying, I always have to pick it apart. No one knows everything about any one thing. I have been looking for some good blog sites on the topic and talking to a lot of the guys at work who have a lot more experience (and now a lot more money) than I do. :)

  4. Congrats on your first post. I too look forward to more from the ‘other half’. We’ve been in the market for 30 years but are not active traders. I’m sure you’ve read that you shouldn’t invest money you can’t afford to loose.

    • I’m so worried about losing money! My wife suggested I use $1,000 of our tax return to invest in stocks, I told her I only wanted $500 (the minimum amount to open a Scottrade account) But she is so supportive of me she insisted I use more. So I do plan on being very careful with our money. :)

  5. Excellent first post! I look forward to reading more from “Mr. Honey”! I am new to stocks also and appreciate your book recommendations. I’ll dig into some of those!

    • Glad you liked it! If you are new to the stock market, I would start with “Stock Investing For Dummies” it was written in 2009, so it’s current and tells you pretty much everything you need to know. Just don’t do what I did and get it on a Nook. It’s the kind of book I wish I could flip back and forth between pages quickly, re-read definitions, and leave notes in. :)

  6. Great list of books, I’m a big Peter Lynch fan and would recommend his other two books too. As a fellow investor, take the failures as a learning experience, even Warren Buffett had big losses. Good luck investing!

  7. It is great news that you have decided to dip a toe in the market. Do your research. Don’t look at the past, look at the future, the business’ barriers to entry, cash flow, industry or social trends, the management team and ethics. For now, never use margin to purchase your shares. Leverage is good, only after you get experience and can cover the debt if there are heavy losses in your trading account.

  8. I have been waiting for your investing post. You and Jen have done an excellent job and truely have come so far! Very proud of you both!! So Honey and Jen keep it up and share with us all how you do!!