“I was married for thirty years, with three children and a house to manage and doing lots of charity work. Then came the divorce…” a reader wrote to me. I called her up this week and we talked.
Our conversation wasn’t about her divorce. In fact it only came up once. We talked more about the success of her family and the financial independence they have achieved. But as she tells it, when she talks with them about their childhood they tell her it wasn’t always the best. I asked her what she meant by that. She said, “We didn’t have a lot of extra money for expensive vacations.” She explained, “The kids worked hard and I had them busy doing lessons/sports and things like that but we didn’t take the vacations that the other families did.” As she spoke I was thinking to myself what an incredible job she did to make sure her family survived.
And that’s when it hit me: She survived. Is it possible that life changing events make us better? Is a survival mindset helpful? In the case of my new friend, a “survival mindset” wasn’t an option. She HAD to survive. She HAD to make ends meet. It is an important lesson for us to think about: She had to do something.
Having to do something isn’t always an investor’s friend. It wasn’t always a successful endeavor for her. “With the children all at college there was no reason not to dedicate myself to hard work and saving,” she wrote. “The hard work was no problem, but my investment choices were far from sensible.” She continued to explain how she thought she could get rich quick and got hurt by the Dotcom Bubble bursting. “I learned that investing in the next best thing rarely works.” She hit the nail on the head writing “Not losing money is paramount.” Surviving the markets is paramount.
Sounds simple. It’s not. She warned me that the last part of her email might sound like an advertisement. Perfect! I’ll shamelessly share it with you:
It was not until I found Richard C. Young’s Intelligence Report and started to invest conservatively that my portfolio began to grow steadily. It has now passed the first one million mark. If I can save anyone from making the investment mistakes that I made, I feel that I will have done some good.
Ah yes. Retirement. I plan to travel around the world and only wish that some of my friends had had the good sense to invest a la Richard Young, so that they would now be in a position to join me.
Amazing things can happen when your life depends on it.
Your survival is important to me. I urge you to sign up (by clicking here) for the Richard C. Young & Co., Ltd. monthly client letter (free even for non-clients) to tap in to Dick Young’s investment survival philosophy.
If you have an investment survival story, I’d love to hear it. Please introduce yourself by emailing me at ejsmith@youngresearch.com.