That’s because, for most of us, our largest single asset is our ability to earn a living. After all, the average lifetime earnings for an American is around $2 million. Of course, that’s an average, but let’s use some investment math to illustrate my point.

If your lifetime earnings are $2 million, and you invest $5,000 in a course to learn a skill that helps you earn 5% more, your ROI is $100,000 or 20 TIMES your investment. Good luck getting that in the stock market right now.

Getting there means choosing to use your time and money to invest back into you!

Higher education used to be how people invested in their future. But with the high cost of tuition and student debt, young people are increasingly uncomfortable with the return on investment. The truth is you can learn anything today. 

All it takes is an internet connection and a “beginner’s mind.” A beginner’s mind is a superpower that allows you to view everything as a learning experience instead of feeling like you have to be the expert immediately.

If you want more money, more time, or more freedom, it’s your responsibility to develop the skills you need to get what you want. No one else can do this for you.

I put together this guide to share how I think about investing in myself and give some actionable ideas for you to build a roadmap of lifelong learning.

How I Learned the Lesson of Investing in Myself

In my early 20s, I was a prop trader — that means a company staked me to make buy and sell decisions in derivative financial markets for (hopefully) a profit.

I loved the markets, but I wasn’t particularly good at doing this, and it was an extremely high-stress environment. This was from 2008 to 2009, right in the middle of the financial crisis.

I watched some of the older traders really struggle, and I didn’t want to end up that way — something needed to change. I wanted out but was so worried about the unknowns of switching gears in a recession.

I was locked into this idea that my career had to be a linear journey “up and to the right” (the trajectory if you were looking at my life on a graph).

This was until I read a book called “The Art of Learning” by Josh Waitzkin. In particular, there’s a chapter titled “Investment In Loss.”

The basic idea of this chapter is that many times we have to take a step backward (loss) to make a giant leap forward. When you consciously make this decision, you have an opportunity cost that becomes your investment. 

In my case, if I quit, I’d be trading my future earnings for a period of time for the prospect that I’d do something better and more valuable by choosing a different path.

I could suddenly view the time and money it would take me to move into a completely new career as an investment in my future, and I quit my job the very next day.

I posted a comment about this journey on a Linkedin video recently. This chapter led me to view everything in life as an investment and recognize that the more I could invest in myself, the better.

A Framework for Investing in Yourself

From my experience, I’ve come to the conclusion that investing in yourself is done for any of three reasons:

1. To create more money
2. To create time
3. To create peace

There are high-leverage skills that work on all three layers. I call these meta-skills. For the sake of this framework, I’m going to concentrate on the first one. Don’t get me wrong, some of the best investments I’ve made have been to achieve twos and threes.

But my view is that all three work together in a reflexive cycle that starts with having more money (or at least enough). 

In the beginning, to make more money, you have to trade your time and/or small amounts of money to acquire new skills that make you more money. Here’s what this framework looks like.

Here’s how time, money, and peace work together.

When we’re just starting out, we usually have time and no money. So, we trade our time for money and gain skills that, guided by experience, make us more valuable.

As we gain more money, we start to use that money to buy more time or convenience, which gives us more peace of mind or time to invest in our health and happiness.

Once you attain a certain level, experts say this is around $75,000, this process also works in reverse. Any wealthy person will tell you that investing in your peace — by cultivating a calm mind, good judgement and a healthy body ends up making you more money and creates a better balance with your time.

The Ultimate List of Ways to Invest in Yourself

So where do we start? In the sections below, I get into the steps I learned that’s been helpful for me. I also break down common resistance points, but to get you started, here’s a non-exhaustive list of ideas categorized by my investment framework above.

Platforms to Learn Anything

• Masterclass
• LinkedIn Learning
• Coursera
• Skillshare
• Books
• Youtube
• Udemy
• Khan Academy

The Most Important Meta Skills (What Makes Everything Easier)

• Better decision making
• How to read a book
• Investing basics
• Design thinking
• Improved communication
• Negotiation
• Be mentored/coached
• Mindfulness/stress management
• Staying organized

Invest in Yourself to Make More Money

These are ideas on how to make more money over the long term. All of these have worked for me at one time or another.

• Learn to invest
• Go back to school
• Take a risk management course
• Learn to budget
• Get a raise
• Get a certification
• Understand compounding and compound interest
• Upgrade your resume to get a better job
• Launch a product
• Learn to build an online course
• Start a freelance side hustle and charge for your time
• Learn to flip on eBay
• Sell stuff you don’t need

Invest in Yourself to Buy Time

These are generally investments to make in yourself to create better efficiency, get more done, or have more freedom with your time.

It’s often easy to dismiss some of these as needless convenience, but if you can get past that resistance and see the ROI in your free time, this category of investment has the highest payoff.

• Try Superhuman email
• Negotiate a four-day workweek
• Use an accountant
• Get a virtual assistant
• Figure out your effective hourly rate (EHR)
• Pay for anything that costs less than your EHR
• Take a digital detox course
• Buy a Bullet Journal
• Order your food delivered
• Use Audible to read on your commute
• Move closer to work
• Build a home office
• Hire a cleaning service
• Have your groceries delivered
• Use a laundry service

Invest in Yourself to Create Peace

We all need more peace in our lives. Here are ideas on how to use your time and money to cultivate more peace and happiness in your life. Ironically, studies have shown that being at peace can help you make better decisions. Better decisions always drop straight to the bottom line.

• Get healthy
• Use your PTO
• Change your career
• Take a sabbatical
• Travel
• Learn to meditate
• Use HRV training
• Buy experiences, not things
• Get organized and declutter your space
• Insure yourself (health insurance, life insurance, etc.)
• Keep a journal
• Optimize your sleep
• Start saying “no” more

How to Invest in Yourself — For People Who Need Steps (Like Me)

The best way to invest in yourself is just to start. However, I tend to think of frameworks and steps to sequence my choices to learn if I’m on the right path or if I need to course-correct. These steps have been helpful to me in my self-investment journey.

1. Learn the Difference Between Spending and Investing

Learning this difference is key to your mental framing and attitude toward using money to better yourself and your quality of life.

When we spend money, it’s usually on perishable goods that we might need for survival OR on anti-necessities that have a very fleeting payoff.

When we invest money, we expect a durable, long-term payoff in one of the three areas of the framework above.

We tell ourselves a lot of stories about money. When I was young, I felt that money was a scarce resource that had to be hoarded. So, I just added money to a pile like Scrooge McDuck and didn’t use money at all. As I’ve learned more and had kids that have given me perspective, I’ve come to this conclusion:

Money’s only valuable if used productively — and you get to define “productive” use. When I made this subtle mental switch, I got better at using money to improve my life instead of keeping it so my ego could watch my bank account go up.

Now, every use of money is an investment to either increase my wealth, increase my time or increase peace in my life.

Action step:

Make a quick list of the top 10 things you spend money on and the top 10 things you are thinking about spending money on. 

If the expenditure improves you as a person, solves problems, and lasts a long time, you probably have an investment.

2. Draw Your Circle of Competence

The circle of competence is a mental model popularized by Warren Buffett. It describes the understanding of the edges of your own knowledge and capabilities; being truly honest with yourself about what you know and don’t know is extremely important. 

When we invest in ourselves, we’re, by definition, trying to expand our circle of competence. But if we don’t know the boundary, we don’t know what will expand our circle versus create a different, less effective circle that doesn’t leverage the huge body of experience we’ve built over the years.

Defining your circle isn’t formulaic. It’s just a matter of inventorying your skills, knowledge, or abilities and being brutally honest about what you know and what you don’t yet know — what you think you know and what you’d like to find out.

Action step:

Write down a list of your skills. Ask people for help if you need more ideas. Once you have a list, categorize your skills into common buckets such as “communication,” “programming,” or “digital marketing.” 

Hang onto this list for the next step.

3. Figure Out Your Highest Point of Leverage

Because what you don’t know is infinitely larger than what you do know, the next step is figuring out what you should learn. Since time’s finite, there are lots of things you should NOT learn. The goal of this step is to figure out what area of your circle of competence gives you the best growth.

For example, it’s very “in” to learn coding skills. I generally agree, and I have my kids learning how to code — I think it’s an essential skill for their future. But not essential for mine. No matter how much I learn, I’ll still need to hire someone better than me to do the software development I need to do.

So, the time investment isn’t a good one for me; it doesn’t leverage my past experience or ladder up some outcome goal in my life.

My highest leverage points are investing and operations. Any investment I can make to become a better decision-maker or run better systems gives me the most growth in money, time, or peace.

Action step:

Take your circle of competence from step two above, and define the circle as narrowly as you possibly can. For example, “My circle of competence is in hiring, building, and leading creative digital content teams.”

By narrowing your circle, you become aware of what you’re truly good at now AND the number of areas within your circle you could get better at very easily.

So, if my circle of competence is in digital marketing, but my highest point of leverage is in building teams, I probably shouldn’t learn how to design in Adobe Photoshop or learn Java. I’m better off seeking skills that help me leverage the teambuilding or operational side of “digital marketing.”

4. Identify the Skills You Need That’ll Make You More Valuable

Now that you’ve identified your highest point of leverage, there are various individual skills to learn that’ll help you level up and grow. This step is about deciding which skills to develop.

In the last step, I said my highest point of leverage was investing. Within investing, there are many skills that I could learn: risk management, making better decisions, charting, real estate investing, stock market investing, cryptocurrencies, hedging, etc.

Action step:

Lay out all of the skills you could learn within this area that are tangential to your highest point of leverage.

5. Create a Roadmap to Acquire These Skills

Based on your time and money budget, lay out a plan to acquire these skills in sequence. Here’s an example of my tracking spreadsheet that I’ve used in the past to learn some new Excel skills:

It doesn’t matter how you organize it, but a tried-and-true lesson of goal setting is carving out time and breaking down your goal into manageable action plans.

Action step:

Take your list from step four above, and prioritize your roadmap.

6. Ask For Help

If you’re struggling with any of the steps above, it’s important to ask for help. The biggest problem areas for young people tend to be identifying a circle of competence and deciding which skills to acquire. This is where help from an outside party can really help.

I’ve even created Google forms with certain questions and sent them to people I know to quickly collect perspectives from trusted friends, colleagues, and mentors.

Through this process, I was able to identify my circle of competence. Part of it happens to be asking great questions, summarizing problems, and breaking problems down into chunks.

Now, I even use my spare time to consult with people thinking about a career change. Please, feel free to contact me if you need help.

Action step:

Find a mentor that you trust, or even just sit down with a friend and talk out the problem.

Where Resistance Comes From and How to Overcome It

“The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.”

Marcus Aurelius, “Meditations”

If you feel resistance or find yourself making excuses about why you can’t invest in yourself, you’re probably on the right track. At a gut level, it means you’re thinking enough about doing it, you just don’t KNOW for sure.

Most resistance is a form of fear that comes from one of three places:

1. Money scarcity mindset
2. Not knowing FOR SURE that it’ll be worth the time/money cost
3. Not knowing which option is best right now

So what helps? How do you overcome resistance and choose yourself?

Following the Steps to Investing in Yourself section will help. Here’s how.

Resistance #1: Money Scarcity Mindset

Having a scarcity mindset around money is crippling. If you view everything as an expense, you’ll never spend money on yourself  — even when you need it to make a growth leap. Just like there’s good debt and bad debt, there’s good spending and bad spending. 

Mentally differentiating between frivolous expense and true investment is key. One heuristic I use to differentiate them is this: if a spend makes me better at X (more productive), it’s an investment.

The truth is, even if you don’t have any money right now, there are designs you can put in place to free up money and get what you want. Or, just putting in the time to do it yourself is a form of investment.

Resistance #2: You Don’t Know for Sure That the Investment Will Pay Off

When you decide something’s an investment, two things happen. First, you’re expecting a long-term payoff, but you’re inherently acknowledging that it might not work out. 

Congratulations! Such is life — almost every decision worth making has an uncertain payoff. We have to decide to grow and trust that we’ll produce the result we want over the long run.

The hack I use to get around this problem is what I refer to as “sizing” or “options betting”. In investing, sizing refers to making your position big enough or small enough so that you get comfortable with a given risk.

This always works. Same with investing in yourself. If a $2,000 course is too much money, how can you learn some of the concepts with YouTube and four hours of your time?

What I call “options betting” refers to dealing with uncertain outcomes by creating a few options for how to tackle a problem, thereby increasing the chances that one approach works.

Then, betting is heavier when you’re more certain about the right approach. You can try this for yourself by testing three different ways to learn a skill to see which way you learn better.

Resistance #3: Not Knowing Which Option Is Best Right Now

This is the hardest to overcome because these days, we can literally learn anything, and a superpower is focusing on what’s the best use of our time. 

To weed out these infinite choices, it’s important to understand your circle of competence and find your highest point of leverage. Your circle of competence tells you what you’re already knowledgeable about and have some skill in (to build from).

Within your circle of competence is your highest point of leverage — the one or two unique talents you have that when applied, supercharge your effectiveness, creative energy, production, etc.

When you’re really clear about these two aspects, you’ve weeded out 95% of options that might get in the way of your decision, and now you’re free to focus on a handful of skills that’ll likely have the highest return on time and money for yourself.

The post The Ultimate Guide to Investing in Yourself — And Roadblocks to Avoid appeared first on Good Financial Cents®.

Where can I get a decent savings rate anymore? If you’re a holder of cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, possibly in a cryptocurrency savings account, where some accounts are paying well over 5%!

Yes, you read that correctly.

Wait, Isn’t Cryptocurrency Super Risky?

Yes, Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other cryptocurrencies are very volatile, making them very hard to hold long-term. For example, this year alone bitcoin has traded down to $3,000 and as high as $12,500! Please, please, please do NOT go out and buy Bitcoin just to try and earn interest on it. Most cryptocurrencies are WAY too volatile.

However, there are various “stable” currencies that trade on a 1-to-1 basis with the US dollar. These are the currencies we want to hold and earn interest on. Even though these currencies are pegged to the US dollar (i.e. 1 stablecoin = $1 USD), this doesn’t mean that you have no risk. Market forces can make a stable coin worth less than a dollar, in a similar way to how money market funds have occasionally “broken the buck.” 

All of this is to say: that just because this account has the words “savings account” next to it, doesn’t mean it’s the same as an FDIC, U.S. dollar savings account at a regulated bank. You need to ultimately decide if the risk is worth the potential returns on a very liquid asset. Here’s how I’m thinking about this new class of accounts.

How to Earn 5%+ in a Crypto Savings Account

Decide How Much Money to Try

As I laid out in my Barbell Investing article, I’m hugely risk averse. I’m leery of “too good to be true” promises, so I run many small experiments where I can learn by doing. This is no different.

I opened the accounts to figure out what I needed to know to decide if I should add more money. I first invested in bitcoin (BTC) in 2014, so I was relatively early and had built up a sizable portfolio of crypto assets over the last six years. I chose to make an initial deposit of $2,000 mainly because I had $2,000 of USDC (Stablecoin) idly sitting in my Coinbase account. 

If you don’t already own cryptocurrency, you’ll choose a dollar amount (for those in the US) that you’re comfortable with. There are generally no minimum deposit or minimum balance requirements; however, some services have minimum withdrawal requirements.

Open a Crypto Savings Account

Coinbase is one of many options. They have a wide range of coins available and competitive deposit rates. Setting up your account is a breeze, and they use the same bank-level encryption that every other financial institution uses.

Choose Which Currency You Want to Hold

Once you have stablecoin or cryptocurrency in your account, you can trade into any of the other available currencies. For the purpose here, I don’t recommend trading cryptocurrencies. Remember, I’m after as stable of a return as I can get that closely mimics a normal savings account, but with a higher return. 

Also, the stablecoins offer the highest interest rates as you can see here:

I chose USDC as my preferred currency simply because I already owned some. I don’t know enough about the differences in these stable coins to recommend one over the other at this time.

Start Earning

Once you’ve deposited money in your account, you don’t need to do anything else. Interest will accrue daily, and is deposited in your account monthly. It’ll look something like this:

Understand How Crypto Savings Differs From Cash Savings

To take this beyond an experiment, we really need to know what the overall risk is here. Your cash currency is protected in several ways that cryptocurrency isn’t.

• First, your savings account is FDIC-insured, so you don’t lose your money if your bank becomes insolvent.

• Second, the U.S. dollar is a world reserve currency backed by the full faith and credit of the U.S. government, whereas the U.S. government doesn’t back any of these stablecoins — YET.

• Third, a stable coin pegged to the U.S. dollar isn’t the same as a dollar. See here about Tether’s peg.

• Fourth, big banks have billions to throw at security. A cryptocurrency upstart might fall short on some security measures. I honestly don’t know how to analyze this at the moment.

Decide to Go Bigger

Understanding the above risks, I don’t think it makes sense to have a gigantic amount of money in these accounts yet. Further, I wouldn’t suggest putting your emergency fund money in an account like this, or any money that you think you can’t live without.

The risk of losing money is unlikely, but it’s non-zero, and it’s absolutely higher than the risk of losing your cash savings account money. But is it worth the risk anyway?

To me, it is — on a portion of my liquid assets. It makes sense for me to go bigger and add more to my account because I’m not risking my emergency fund and I was already taking many of the risks above by holding USDT in another account without getting paid for it like I am now.

Does a Crypto Savings Account Make Good Financial Cents?

For now, this experiment makes sense for people who are long-term cryptocurrency holders, or people looking to juice their rate of return on liquid assets. However, because of the additional risks outlined above, it doesn’t make sense to put a huge amount of your savings in one of these accounts.

What would I need to see to change my mind?

I would put a significant amount of money behind this account if my principal was insured against loss and theft in similar ways to the US banking system.

Basically, if I could insure my account against devaluation, theft, and insolvency —  at say, 2% per year — I’d borrow millions of dollars to add to this account and earn a very healthy low-risk spread. This is the definition of a carry trade.

The post Can a Crypto Savings Account Beat the Bank? appeared first on Good Financial Cents®.

I’ve been investing in the markets for over 16 years, 5 of those as a professional trader. I came out of college in the middle of the dot-com bust and was lucky to get my first job as a banker.

I traded through the financial crisis and Great Recession, and I’m now trying to navigate through this pandemic-induced depression-esque market. Like many of you, I’m struggling with what to do.

Since my trading days, I’ve become much better at not losing money, and I want to share a little of how I do that by employing a barbell investing strategy.

To some, this may seem ultra-conservative, but I believe it actually takes out a great deal of risk and allows me to be very aggressive when the time is right.

What the Heck Is a Barbell Strategy?

The vast majority of financial advisors will talk to you about asset allocation that roughly mimics a normal bell curve like the one below.

This strategy calls for setting aside enough cash to weather a storm, spreading your money out amongst asset classes (typically 60/40 stocks to bonds), and maybe a small allocation to very high-risk asset classes, and some cash.

If you were to graph this with risk on the X-axis it might look something like this:

A barbell strategy on the other hand basically involves investing on the ends of the risk curve and avoiding the middle, and looks something like the below graphic.

What this means is that I keep a lot of cash on hand, very little stocks, bonds, and traditional market assets, and then allocate a much smaller percentage of my liquid assets to alternative investments with a higher risk profile such as high-yield bond speculation, derivatives, private equity, venture capital, and cryptocurrency.

A barbell strategy can easily be applied within asset classes as well, say, holding 80% blue chip dividend stocks with great balance sheets and 20% small-cap growth stocks. Or, the same allocation of treasuries to junk bonds in a bond portfolio.

Why Avoid the Middle?

One of my favorite thought leaders on the subject of risk is Nassim Taleb, who authored Fooled By Randomness, The Black Swan, and Antifragile. Taleb is a mathematician, risk expert, and former hedge fund manager, who rose to prominence during the financial crisis of 2008 because he predicted it.

Taleb argues for a barbell investing strategy because he believes that over-engineering of the global financial markets, leverage and how interconnected all the banks are makes the system less robust and more fragile.

Thus, smaller shocks to the system get exacerbated more frequently. These risks are essentially “hidden”. there are hidden risks in the middle (stocks and bonds) that are not get accounted for in modern financial risk models.

Mortgage Backed Securities Risk

A great example is how every single one of the major US housing default models used to package Mortgage Backed Securities, did not include the ability for home prices to go even the slightest bit negative.

When home prices went the slightest bit negative, the entire thinly capitalized mortgage system seized up and cascaded to every interconnected financial market. This was a major risk that was not accounted for by a simple tweak to a model.

Basically, a historically safe asset class (homes) was transformed into a very risky weapon of mass destruction via financial engineering.

Stock Buyback Risk

Another example that we are seeing play out now is corporate stock buybacks. Low interest rates have incentivized CEO of companies to issue debt to buy back shares to boost stock prices.

While this behavior has increased stock prices in the short term, corporations are left without the free cash needed to weather rough times such as the global shutdown of business due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Many of these companies have been buying their own shares right into the highs, and now suspending buybacks when prices are low. This obviously violates rule number one of investing – buy low and sell high.

credit: thevisualcapitalist.com

What’s important to understand for this article, is that issuing cheap debt to buy back shares has dramatically altered the risk profile of stocks (hidden risk) to the point that thousands of public companies might cease to exist without federal bailout assistance.

How I Use a Barbell Strategy

The purpose of a barbell strategy is to avoid hidden risks and take more control over investment strategy by staying very safe (cash) and taking high risks that are understandable with a smaller portion of the portfolio.

Theoretically, you can achieve a decent blended return and limit your exposure to black swan-type events.

#1. “Cash Is King”, Not “Cash Is Trash”

Ray Dalio, the billionaire hedge fund manager (who I actually respect and admire) proclaimed “cash is trash” in a CNBC video, advocating for a global stock and bond portfolio.

That interview pretty much marked the top of the bull market as global stock markets have melted down. He has a good point that I won’t go into here, but for the average person (i.e. not a billionaire hedge fund founder) cash is actually king.

Yes, interest rates are terrible for cash savers. However, cash is a low-cost form of insurance against everyday setbacks. Paying for a $400 emergency with cash instead of getting a personal loan or worse, has value.

But let’s talk about investing. Cash has options value. In finance, an options contract has an implicit value because it is a right, not an obligation. You have the option to do A or to do B.

Having a good cushion of cash sitting in the bank allows you many options to invest when the time and opportunity are right without selling other assets (stocks, your home) to free up the cash.

The flexibility that comes with this option value is a key piece of information missed by most people. I have close to 80% of my liquid assets in cash. So, I was able to avoid the recent stock market downturn, and now I can pounce on good investing opportunities at great prices.

By the way, do you know how much cash on hand Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway keeps on its books?

#2. Insurance

Many people think insurance is a waste of money, but as Talib points out in his book, Antifragile, insurance is an asset that will actually perform better for you in volatile times. Insurance is essential and has a high payoff for you at the precise time risk increases.

Having adequate amounts of homeowners insurance, car insurance, umbrella coverage, and life insurance is key to avoiding adverse situations where you have to spend a huge sum of money unexpectedly.

I also use keyman insurance in my businesses along with general and professional liability coverage.

#3. Low Exposure to Stocks and Bonds

Contrary to the advice of most money management professionals, I keep very little relative exposure to traditional stocks and bonds. I have retirement accounts that contain these instruments that are passive.

If you look at my actual liquid asset allocation vs. what a top fintech money manager says I should target, you can see how their advice (green bars) is the exact opposite of my strategy.

My exposure to stocks and bonds is in the form of low-cost ETFs in my tax-advantaged retirement accounts.

Because my duration is long on this money (meaning I won’t need it for 30+ years) I am okay with the exposure, and I believe the tax compounding over time makes up for the additional risks.

#4. 10-15% Exposure to Pure-Play Risk

A pure play risk is generally an investment that carries a high expectation of failure, but a massive payoff if it works. The best example is a startup/venture capital type investment. The best estimates are that 75-80% of new businesses will fail – that’s the base case.

But the expected return on an investment that does well is not 6% per year. It’s more like 4-100 TIMES your investment.

Because the risk is so high in these investments, there generally aren’t a lot of hidden risks – I basically have a good idea of my expected loss going in.

I don’t believe that is the case for most generally accepted financial investments as the last several financial crises have shown us.

So what does this look like? I seek out pure-play exposures that are not tied to the stock market. I invest in startups and back local entrepreneurs like restaurants. I also maintain a decent-sized cryptocurrency position that I began accumulating in 2014.

I plan to hold this investment until crypto is a proven winner, or ‘goes to 0’ because the magnitude of the payoff is enormous if the Bitcoin experiment works.

#5. The Remaining 5-10% I Invest in Myself

I use this money to increase my skills and leverage what I am good at to make me and my companies more marketable. This process has compounded my earning power over time and allowed me to re-invest in my businesses, or in other non-correlated passive income sources.

Is a Barbell Strategy for You?

A barbell strategy’s main purpose for an astute risk manager is to remove the probability of large blowup events from seemingly ‘safe’ investments.

A barbell isn’t for everyone, but one of the main benefits I’ve seen from it is psychological – I know with certainty, that no single event will impact my family’s financial security.

That allows me to take more risks with a smaller amount of capital and be better connected to the companies, opportunities, and people that I invest in.

What are your thoughts? Are you worried about risk, and could a barbell strategy help?

The post How I Use a Barbell Investing Strategy to Avoid Financial Ruin appeared first on Good Financial Cents®.