A Guide To Resession Proof Investing

There are Main three reasons people don’t invest in them selves on a regular basis: -

1. They spend more than than they earn so they have to keep moving the goals post of how much they need. They get a wage of £20k a year. Then spend more, they now need 50K, then they need £100K, £250K, one million, two million, a gazillion. So they never quit, they just keep working to pay debts.
2. They totally overestimate how much they would need to retire. They'll have a stab at a number but it will be something like £300,000. The number is so large they think that they never get it, so they never start. If you sit down and work it out how much you need to live each year I guarantee it will be so much less than what you think?
3. I'm too old or too young to start. True if your in your fifties and sixties you will have to invest bit more maybe 20 to 25% of your wages but the most important thing is, you start NOW!. Plus people are living so much longer now. If your young in the early twenties you'll have so much longer, so a minimum of 10% will build you a fantastic lifestyle when your older.

The first step before you do anything? You must know what you are worth and how much you need to live a comfortable lifestyle? The answer to these questions is going to be totally different for each person. For some people £20k is going to be fine for others £100K is not going to be enough. This is how you work out how much you need. Take every bill you pay each month add it all up and multiply it by twelve. This is the figure you need each and every year to live. Now add 15%. This is our buffer and pays for the nicer things in life like holidays & meals out. It also pays for replacements when stuff breaks things a new washer or dyer and repairs to the car. But make sure you say when I hit this number every year from my slow burning account that’s it I'm set. Then don’t move the goal posts again.

Tony Robbins goes through the psychology, mechanics & asset allocation of this type of investing really well.

At school we are all told how add, subtract, divide and multiply. We’re told how to talk correctly, which wives Henry the VIII had beheaded and the rain calculations of Winnipeg in Canada. But we’re never shown how to understand money. We’re told virtually nothing about what to do with it and how to maintain it so it looks after us as we get older.
If your from my generation you were probably told “get a good job, a bank account & save 10% of your wages.” You were also probably told you can trust the banks they’ll look after any investment you put with them.” So that’s vast majority of people did. We all bought policies, pensions and other financial products from companies and people we thought we could trust. We asked them to invest it for us and we got on with our life. For a while things were great, each year we would get a statement of how well our investments did. Then the crash of 2008 came along, which caused not only companies to go bankrupt but entire countries as well. Pensions and policies that always went up went into free fall. We found that the companies who were supposed to know about safe investing, really knew no more than the average guy on the street. I’m not telling you to totally ignore the banks, but it’s your money. Before you take any advice and invest, think it through. What I intend to do is show you how to investment for the future and still have the benefits of having a bit of fun when you make a profit.

So how do we invest our money but keep it safe for our future? First of all you will need four accounts or buckets. A slow burning account, a fast burning account & two current or checking accounts. The slow burning account is our security vehicle for when things don’t go as planned. The fast burning account is a fast growing vehicle. This can be anything that you can make big gains on but also carry a fair bit of risk. We use one of the current accounts as a reward account for when we make profit on our investments and the other account we use purely as a money movement account

The Dream Bucket

This is our fun bucket. If we do this but don't reward ourselves we‘ll get really bored really quick. We won’t see the point of doing this apart from the numbers in our bank account getting bigger. Start by writing a list of the stuff you want to save toward. It doesn’t have to be a lot to start with. A meal, new outfit, new microwave. If you want to it can be a major purchase like a car, but my advice start small, see the benefits sooner and get used to rewarding yourself and you'll enjoy the whole process. The thing to remember about this bucket is that nothing goes in this bucket until we make a profit on our investments from our fast burning bucket


The Fast burning bucket.

This is where we do our investments for rapid growth of money. You pay a maximum of 5% of your wages in each and every month. The thing to remember with this bucket is don't kid yourself what’s an investment. So don’t buy a horse saying it’s an investment. A man once said, “anything that eats while you sleep is not a good investment” stuff like a boat is not and investment. It’s a hole in the water that sucks money. Stuff like this needs to go in your dream bucket. Before you invest in anything make sure you know what you’re investing in. Don’t live by other people’s advice. If someone tells you “put all of your money in this its going to sky rocket”. Think it through and don’t ever use money from your slow burning bucket to make high-risk investments. When you make a decent profit from your investments, which can range from anywhere from 25% up, cash it in! If you use classic cars as your fast burning bucket and have 30K of profit tied up in them, but won’t sell them you’re a collector not an investor.

Investments suitable for the fast burning bucket are: -

Stocks & Shares
Fine art
Classic Cars
Antiques
Real Estate
Buying & selling currencies
Flipping domains and websites
Flipping just about anything

The slow burning bucket

This is to put money into and then leave it alone. Each and every month you pay at least 5% of your wages and 33% of any profits we make from the investments from our fast burning bucket. Typically the rate of return of these types of accounts ranges from 2.5% to 5%. The rate of return is low however this means they carry a lot less risk so are a lot more secure. Initially it like watching grass grow but because the interest compounds eventually it has explosive growth.

Investments suitable for the slow burning bucket are: -

Isa’s
Saving accounts
Government bonds
Close ended investments

The Money Movement Bucket

All you need for this bucket is a basic bank account. Its purely to move money into and out of that’s all. Have at least 10% of your wages and profits paid into this account and then distribute it to the various buckets. You could get a current account that pays a little interest but the money should not be in this account more then a few days.

So by now you should have at least three of the four buckets, Money movement, Security and Dream. The forth is usually the toughest bucket to find.

“What do I invest in”? This is the million-dollar question and I mean that quite literally. Get this right and you can retire tomorrow. I'm not going to tell you where to invest your hard-earned cash the list is endless. In its most basic form its anything you can flip for a profit. It will also be down to your personal knowledge. If you have a hobby, say you collect coins, stamps or antiques that’s where you can have most of your money. No matter what you invest in you’re going to make mistakes and lose money. However as long as you've protected your security bucket things won’t be too bad and you will recover. My advice what ever you invest in make sure you understand it don't go putting money into anything you don't fully understand. The amount doesn’t matter you and start as small as you want and use the profits to invest more that way you’ll learn about your field of investment without any major losses. The main thing is don’t put it off any more do this NOW!