The vultures are out for your money. They will promise to grow your money and make you a billionaire. They will scare you with imagined scenarios. Don’t listen to them. They not only want your money, they want your life too.You will work hard and earn money. But you will never be able to enjoy it. And you’ll never become a billionaire either. The only people who have managed to make money in the market, any market, stocks, real estate or debt, are those who have managed to time it perfectly. You and I can’t even get our cars serviced on time. And you think you’ll time the market? Remember the events that impact the market are mostly unpredictable. You and I will always be either too lazy or too greedy or too cautious or too unprepared to take the right decision and act on them. You and I will always be late to get in and late to get out. And if you think that your fund manager is any better than you, think again. He’s just a guy like you and me. In the process, you’ll spend the best years of your life giving away money to someone you haven’t even met. When you invest in a mutual fund, do you get to interview the fund manager? And you’re giving your money to him? Why not spend it and enjoy life?Travel. Travel regularly and far. Walk in the mountains in the Andes. Stretch out aimlessly under the moon on a beach in Tahiti. Marvel at the mighty Himalayas from the base camp of Everest. Feel scared in the streets of Caracas. There are a thousand beautiful experiences to be discovered in India itself. Drop plans of buying a house. For the EMI you pay, you can rent a bigger, better house. By the time you finish repaying your loan, your house will be so old that it will have no resale value. There will be newer apartments in the area and no one will buy your old house. Worse, the new hot area will be somewhere else. I suspect that despite my warnings, you plan to work very hard to make more money so that you can give it to someone you don’t know or gamble it all on the stock market. In the process you will be so stressed out that you will forget what your wife looks like. Even if your investments succeed, which I doubt, what’s the point of having some money but forgetting what your wife looked like?
