Top Investing Mistake #10: Not Finding Your Groove
Investing can be a complex art, with many nuances and possibilities. You can invest in real estate, stocks, currencies, businesses and oil and gas. There are as many ways to invest as there are people selling investments. How can you know what will work for you?
As with most things in life, we really don’t know until we try. Personally, I have invested in stocks, options, real estate, oil and gas, and businesses. Each one is different and has its pros and cons. Real estate is quite simple, and does not require a lot of time and effort over the long term. But it also can be problematic because you have to deal with tenants and fix things. For some people, real estate requires far too much maintenance and therefore not right for them.
That’s the point of this whole post. Some investment vehicles are right for some people, and not for others. For someone who doesn’t like real estate because it requires too much maintenance, stocks might be a better choice. Once you buy a stock, you never have to do anything to maintain it, and they will never even send you the physical certificates. Although it is not less risky than real estate, you definitely don’t have the maintenance issues you have with rental property.
Some people try investing in one thing and then decide that “investing isn’t for them.” Just because we lost money in the recent stock decline doesn’t mean we can’t invest in something else. There are many people who discovered that real estate wasn’t right for them because it is too annoying to maintain the property. This means that instead of investing in more real estate, they might want to try investing in something else.
That’s what I mean by Finding your Groove. We each have natural tendencies and preferences. Someone who likes to physically touch their investments might like real estate. Someone who loves numbers and mathematical analysis might be good at trading stocks using technical indicators. I think that to become a successful investor you need to find the asset that works for your personality.
And that relates to a general rule of life: Keep trying until you succeed. We can invest in several different ways before we find the one that works best for us. So we want to try various investment vehicles until we find our own investment groove. Don’t look outside for someone to tell you what is best for you. Look inside to find what you would enjoy and be good at.
Related posts:
- Top Investing Mistake #9: Not Doing More of What is Working
- Top Investing Mistake #3: Listening to People who are Totally Unqualified
- Top Investing Mistake #5: Not Managing Risk
- Top Investing Mistake #1: Not Having the Right Mindset
- Top Investing Mistake #8: Not Getting Buy-In from Important People
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is one of my favorite financial books of all time. It's an allegory about a guy who has a terrible job, and how he overcomes challenges to achieve his dreams.
