I started to talk about a way to start investing on what I learned from peer to peer investing, but I didn’t explain what made me say “I need to start investing”, and I believe this is even more important than saying what has worked for me.
For me it all started in 2020, you probably know the drill here, COVID-19 hit different populations in different ways but I was paying attention to the financial market and seeing the drop in different sectors thinking how would this affect my daily life, I was too scared seeing the downhill trends in the charts on my Stocks app and it made sense, I didn’t know anything about it, so these lines where just lines going down in red for me, how could I not be scared of them?
Fast-forward a few months, and the recovery of the markets starts to be noticeable, all the charts show their graphs in green and the lines have an upwards trend, but here I am, seeing all this data on my screen and still not understanding much of what I’m seeing.
This was my inflection point, I started to see how much it scared me to move money away from my bank and put it into what I considered an extremely risky thing, and of course, at this point (and writing this now I see how silly it sounds) I realized that I had no idea what kind of risks people assumed when putting their money into these, and what kind of returns you could get because of it.
Education is the passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to those who prepare for it today. — Malcolm X
Education can help us break any barrier in our path, I needed one on this matters, so I started listening to the people in my community, their thoughts and fears around the topic and thanks to a friend of mine that started on this journey too but was more advanced, got my first glance at Unshakable by Tony Robbins.
This book was the gate for me to train my brain to start rationalizing and thinking about what I was seeing on a logical side and throw out the emotional decisions that kept me away from investing. This was the first time I actually understood the word “investing”, remember at this point I was still thinking about this whole thing as “spending”.
Now, one book wasn’t enough to change my life, but it was enough for me to throw out the biggest fears I had about building wealth. This journey starts like any other big decision in our life, it’s emotional, you ponder if you are making the right calls and you start to envision how the future will look like before you actually make it.
Why is it like that though? — I would love you to pause a second and think about what I just said in previous paragraphs, education helped me break the barrier to start building wealth, I have an engineering degree and have been privileged enough to receive an above-average education for the first 23 years of my life in my country, but here I was, staring at a bunch of graphs that influence the way I can live not knowing anything about them.
I wonder if you would feel the same, I’m pretty sure most people reading this blog post will, the education system in most countries lacks any financial advice, we learn all the important elements of math, physics, chemistry, and other important topics that should prepare us for the real world but we omit the most important topic, how to grow wealth.
I don’t hold any answers on how we can truly improve this situation and get solutions implemented into our education system, I do however know people that are working on solving these issues and I’m trying to support them as much as I’m able.
But speaking of the present and to the topic at hand, I have now invested in various assets with various risks associated with each one for a little bit more than 7 months as of the published date of this article and I know 2021 has been an exciting and incredible year too for the investment crowd.
My financial goals are simple, and you can learn all about them through books like I will teach you to be rich by Ramit Sethi, Unshakable by Tony Robbins, through YouTube, and blog posts. After reading and watching various resources I ended up coming up with how much risk I was able to tolerate and decided on the following percentages for my portfolio.
- 5% on collectibles like art,
- 5% on Cryptocurrencies,
- 15% on peer-to-peer lending,
- 15% on available cash in my bank accounts,
- and 60% on low-cost index funds.
I try to keep all these very simple and not pay attention to most of them unless its that time of the month where I will invest in either of them, I keep a spreadsheet with the percentages just to see how I’m doing before I invest money, just to be sure that I’m not exceeding my tolerance rate on any of the assets and… that’s it.
Simple right? I know there will be great years where my overall unrealized returns will grow and bad years where I might have unrealized losses, but overall it doesn’t matter that much, what keeps my mind at ease is knowing that I’m doing this for the big picture of my life and my journey won’t be a couple months, it will be a decade or more until I reach the final steps, I will not cash out any unrealized returns until it reaches that goal.
Which is to be Financial Independent, the first step to accomplish F.I.R.E., although for me being Financial Independent, is the beginning of the end of my journey. I love what I do for a living but I believe that taking out the need of having to do that for a living and just doing it for the love of the craft can be empowering, that’s what I aspire, become great at my craft and empower others through their love of the craft and mine to become better.
If you would like to know the platforms I use to invest, here are some affiliate links
Peer-to-peer lending platforms
Cryptocurrencies
Stocks and ETFs
And if you would like to talk more about investing, investing platforms or dig more about my experiences, please send me a message on Twitter.