You sound like you feel defeated so much that you lost hope. Get away from that pizza place and you will feel positive again when you make a little more money. ________________________ I agree Trendlover, perhaps discouraged. He seems to be trying different things without much success. The struggle to success is lonely and sometimes it is hard to tell if it just you or the environment. I can suggest "consistency", you gotta keep plugging away, even if it means finding out what doesn't work.
When I first went to the local community college a few years ago, I filled out all of the typical financial aid forms. I live with my parents but I was pretty much alone for the tuition. They said I didnât qualify for anything but the âBoard of Directorsâ scholarship. I thought I was all special until I looked up what it was for. It ended up being a one time scholarship for new students who didnât qualify for anything else. So I got $500 for my first 2 semesters. I ran out of money after the first and didnât go back. I think we just need to find ways to lower the costs instead of looking for ways to pay for it. When my parents went to college I think they got half scholarships and worked part time jobs and graduated with no debt. You definitely canât do that now.
I say "amen" to the lower college costs. I am now saving for my daughters college education. (I have abandoned my previous strategy)
Thank you for the kind thoughts. You guys have certainly showed much more understanding than others here. I donât want sympathy though. Yes I am very discouraged. I feel like Iâve tried everything and have lost at it all. I donât blame anybody, but it is very difficult because literally nobody I know has any ambition. Nobody wants to change the world like me. Nobody wants to make lots of money and stick it to the man. Nobody wants to start a business. Nobody I know knows the what the bid â ask spread is. Iâm trying to build an automated system now with Visual Basic. Itâs like learning a whole new language. Nobody I know knows anything about programming. I search on the internet, but sometimes you just want someone to bounce ideas off of. The local community college has some intro classes which I might take. I feel like Iâm swimming upstream by myself. I donât know whatâs wrong with people nowadays. Itâs like they donât want to get ahead.
however, without taking substantial, some may say extreme risk, you are just going to churn and barely survive. you will not be wiped out if your skilled, but your not going to get wealthy either unless you take huge risk---- of course there may be some exceptions--but they are indeed extremely rare. in other words, if you eliminate the potential for bad luck by not taking enough risk, you will also eliminate the good luck that will make you rich. surf surf
Yes, not easy. Sometimes a change to a different environment gives a better view, and less stress and anger. So much difference in living in a crime and poor neighborhood, then moving to a better place. Everything looks better.
Agree, if you are going to survive long term i.e more than a few years you have to be brilliant or average but 'shock proof', which for me translates buying below a long term average or low and not using leverage. Effectively a value approach. Value players make money over the long term by not having devastating losses becuse they bought just after the conditions that cause devastating losses to those that buy higher up. It seems to me that many approaches are the same thing come at from a different angle. What I do would be regarded as Value by some, a Low P/BV by an academic etc. I would argue true value investing is probably one of the few ways that almost anyone who is prepared to put in the same learning and effort as they would to develop a successful law or other professional practice can generate (possibly only modest) positive returns over the long run. i.e it is a viable business just like many others for someone of reasonable intelligence and dedication. The cash flow charateristics are 'feast and famine' but then so are many businesses. a friend in the high end Jewelry business pointed out to me that in that business, just like the stock market there are brief periods when you can make extraordinary returns, but you have to recognise it and be positioned to take advantage of ot - sound familiar to stock market players? Seems to me all the money managers with multi year tenure are value players - if you buy below a long run average at some time the market will bail you out if you are unleveraged (this is key). Riding commodity futures or hot stocks at nosebleed valuations seems to yield much shorter term success, as we have repeatedly seen. I was told by someone who would know that there a tiny handful of people who make serious money consistently and most make money one year and give it back over the following two years ie. make in bull and lose in bear. As for 'buy and hold' this seems to have been a mantra that came about as commissions dropped. i.e. it was promoted by Wall St for their own benefit as they shifted to asset based fees as a way to offset this as fewer customer contact people would be needed to manage the same client base under this model and they could concentrate on selling higher value (to Wall St) products.
this is a bad example. how many homes went from $30k to $500k in 30 years? only in particular markets like san francisco did that happen. yet you compare best-case real estate markets with the dow which is merely an average case for stocks. why don't you compare individual best-case stocks to best-case real estate markets? doesn't take a genius to see which wins.
Where will the money go? What are the other options to put savings towards that will keep up with inflation? Seems like RE and Stocks are the only place to park wealth. Sure we are on a downswing in both assets but they will swing up eventually as over the long term the indexes and RE have continued to make new highs. I did say Lonnnnnnnnnng term.