Every week I read a large number of personal finance and investing articles. Here’s my latest weekly shortcut to the best.
Across the Internet, around the watercooler at work, in pubs and at garage sales, people are talking about how they’re going to make some extra money on eBay, or by trading shares, or by setting up a blog.
It seems much less common to talk about your salary, or about how you plan to get a raise over the next 12 months.
Perhaps there’s a taboo about discussing your salary, particularly here in class-conscious Britain? A reticence that doesn’t extend to boasting about how you bought a small-cap growth share that turned into the next Microsoft, or the profit you made selling a secondhand scooter on Craigslist.
This is ironic; as I discussed in the first post in this series on salary, the income we make through working is the most important source of money most of us will ever enjoy.
But exactly how important is it? What is your salary really worth?
Like many investors who (perhaps foolishly) invest a portion of their funds into individual shares, I’ve an ambivalent relationship to stop loss investing strategies.
If a stop loss ‘did what it said on the tin’, I’d have no complaints.
Who wouldn’t want to Stop Losses when investing? It sounds like Nirvana, a one-way ticket to profits.
But what setting a stop loss order really does is guarantee you lock in a loss if it’s triggered.
There’s a straightforward way to make enough money to cover your mortgage, buy food and clothes, pay for your kids’ haircuts, and leave enough money to spare for investing.
This method is not effortless, but you’re not afraid of hard work, right?
This top money-making method will also:
- Teach you new skills
- Help you meet new people
- Make you a valuable member of the community
All that and it earns you money!
So why don’t you hear about it on any of the ‘Get Rich Quick’ Internet sites?
Because there’s not much money to be made reminding people that their career and salary could be their number one financial asset.
Health is wealth
I was reminded about this last week. Having foolishly taken a few days holiday, I ended up confined to bed, hit by a flu virus that felt like a baseball bat.
The stock market might have mounted a bit of a recovery over the past ten days, but unfortunately your writer has gone the other way. Picking up a particular virulent strain of Lurgy maximus while messing about on the river last weekend, I’ve been confined to bed for the past 96 hours on a diet of Ibuprofen and freshly squeezed orange juice.
I’m happy to report I’m feeling much better today though, so please do stay subscribed to Monevator, and look out for a resumption in posting once I’ve caught up with my other work next week.
