One of the ways that we have begun to take steps to invest more is to make a little game of it. While we’ve laddered our CD’s, balanced with some bonds, and tried to be conservative with our mutual funds, we knew that we wanted a little more FUN in our portfolio.
Like many people, we empty our pockets of loose change at the end of each day into a jar. We used to call that our “fun money” and would use it towards things that we didn’t really need or for spending money on our vacations, etc.
This year we started doing something a little different with those coins. We began picking individual stocks and buying a few here and there with the money a couple of times a year. We decided since this was our mad money, that we could be a little mad with it.
Our first buy was after I came home from a press trip (I am a blogger and a travel journalist) from a Disney experience. I told my husband that while I’m not a big Disney fan (I don’t like theme parks and my movie choices run closer to drama) that I was impressed by what they were doing with their merchandising.
We spent some time looking up the stock and doing a little research and knew that this was going to be our first MAD PURCHASE. I think of buying individual stocks to be equivalent to going to the casino…it’s a gamble and you have to only play with money that you don’t mind losing, so we ONLY use our coins in the jar.
This week he was watching a television show about electric cars and mentioned we should look into Tesla. Unfortunately, the stock prices had shot up sky high, so we didn’t have enough in the jar to make the minimum purchase, but we are watching what it does. In the meantime, we’ll wait until one of us has an experience with a brand that we’d love to be involved with.
While we may never become Warren Buffet wealthy with this method, it is teaching us to do our research and to learn more about the stock market.
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