Who Knew Money Could Be Worth So Much! A good friend of mine lived in Russia during the 1998 financial crisis. Just before the brink of Russia's default, the country redenominated the Ruble, with one new Ruble equivalent to 1,000 old Rubles. People were allowed to trade in the old Rubles for the new ones. My friend kept a few crisp old Ruble bank notes. His mother thought he … [Read more...]

Investing in the stock market can be a wild roller coaster. You’ll have some really good days and you’ll have some really bad days. Nothing beats the sheer exhilaration of watching your holdings soar! And nothing is more crushing than losing hard earned money! The U.S. has been in a 7 year bull market. Since the lows of 2008, the S&P 500 has rebounded over 230%! While I … [Read more...]

I have been investing since my sophomore year of college. I was pretty excited when I opened my first brokerage account with Scottrade and funded it with a large sum of $1,000! The first two stocks I purchased were Berkshire Hathaway and Apple. Since then I've learned some pretty important investing rules. To help out, I'm sharing some investing rules I've learned over the … [Read more...]

When I first read Ben Graham's value investing bible, The Intelligent Investor, I became hooked on investing and finance. The whole idea of letting your money work for you really appealed to me. In the book, Graham alluded to the idea of passive and active investing. Graham described two different types of investors: defensive investors and enterprising investors. Defensive … [Read more...]

Have you ever been to a tropical resort for vacation? Chances are some of the resort’s salespeople contacted you about buying a timeshare. I’ve actually been to one of those presentations before (I’ll talk about it more later). What did you think about the sales pitch? It was probably pretty aggressive, right? A lot of these salespeople like to target happy vacationers. In my … [Read more...]