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Your margin of safety, a habit of my fairly wealthy investor, is easy to say yet hard to do. Like most things in life worth doing, it takes a certain mindset, it takes commitment. It is not intuitive, far from it.
On social media, we’re blasted with the false hope of easy living. “Play the market,” they say. Then, you look at the disasters with crypto or memes stocks, for example, and it’s a rat’s nest of trades gone bad.
Life isn’t easy.
And it gets harder.
As my father-in-law Dick Young reminds me, “Survival Guy getting old isn’t for the faint of heart, and it’s expensive. More expensive than even I, one of the more careful investors in the world, ever imagined it would be.”
So, I have that to look forward to.
But here we are, dear investor, saving ‘til it hurts. But please don’t mistake the skills that got you to where you are as the ones you’ll need to invest in where we’re going. You can plan, plan, plan, spend time on financial models plugging in this number and that one, and hope it all works out.
Financial models might look good on paper or on the web. But models can’t teach you the emotional toll of losing money in the market with no paycheck to back it up. They can’t teach you how it will feel when you say to your spouse, “We need to talk.” Or how you’ll react. We’re human, after all.
The world is a dangerous place. It feels different today. It happens slowly, then incredibly fast.
Work to surround yourself and your family with a margin of safety. Yes, life is short, but man, days can be long.
Action Line: I’m here to help you when you’re ready to talk.
Originally posted on Your Survival Guy.
