Why aren’t you a millionaire? Why aren’t you retired, reading this blog while sipping a drink with a paper umbrella in the glass right now? You read these crazy statistics that 80% of households have less than $10,000 saved and 90%+ of people don’t think they’ll ever be able to retire, so I guess that means they’re just planning on working until the day they die. Thanks, but no thanks.
This is a blog about investing. This is a blog about how I have wisely invested the family’s savings to become a millionaire before my 34th birthday. This blog is about how I take all that money that Wall Street is dying to give out, while avoiding all the sucker bets that Wall Street uses to try to take it all back. This is a blog about getting a ticket on the Financial Freedom Express. The ride is great and the umbrella drinks are tasty, so I’ll see you there.
Hello, nice to meet you
My name is Stocky Fox. I am 37 years old (that’s incredibly old for a fox whose average lifespan is only about 5 years, by the way). Mrs. Fox and I have a 3-year old cub, ‘Lil Fox, and second, Mini Fox, who just joined us about four months ago.
I am a self-diagnosed personal-finance hobbiest. Some people like building model airplanes or collecting stamps, some enjoy running marathons (never got that one—foxes are really fast over short distances, but we don’t have the stamina) or shopping for shoes. I enjoy managing our family’s finances: setting up the accounts, determining which investments to choose, tracking the results and comparing them to the market benchmarks, creating graphs that show the Fox family’s progress towards its financial goals, and so on. As hobbies go, I think it’s actually a pretty constructive one in that doing this well will help you achieve financial security and independence. Read that line again . . . if you invest wisely and minimize the most common investing mistakes, you will take a major step towards financial security and independence. That is Mr Fox’s goal (for really important statements I revert to third person), and maybe it’s yours too.
Mrs Fox and I met in business school, we have typical office jobs, and live in the suburbs of Los Angeles. Like a lot of you out there, we want to have a secure future for ourselves and our little ones. Since we don’t make millions of dollars each year, we know that saving our money and then investing it wisely is paramount to achieving those goals. Over the past 15 years of our adult working lives, we have saved diligently and in my opinion we have invested those savings wisely. What’s our end goal? We want to retire while we’re still young so we can spend more time with our little cubs as they grow up, we want to buy a sailboat and cruise around the world, we want to ensure that our cubs can go to the absolute best university their grades and drive can get them in to, we want to go into our golden years without financial constraints or worries.
I started saving money when I was in college, and I immediately started investing that money in the stock market. I continued to save more, and after a few years I got a wonderful surprise: The money I made on my investments each year was more than I was saving each year. I had caught the wave and was starting to ride it in. Today we have a tidy little nestegg that will keep us flush well into our golden years.
Why is this blog worth your time?
Successfully investing isn’t hard and it doesn’t require a ton of brains (as evidenced by me), but it doesn’t come naturally for everyone. Some of the smartest and most professionally successful people I know aren’t good financial planners. A lot don’t have the time to dedicate to investing that I choose to. Most don’t enjoy it near as much as I do (and they are probably less socially awkward than I am because of it). Others are brilliant in many areas but investing doesn’t really “click” for them.
Maybe one of those descriptions applies to you. If so, I hope this blog helps. I’ll use this blog to show you how I stroll through the forest of Wall Street, gathering all the berries, salmon, and honeycomb my family could possibly want. I’ll also show you how I avoided all the bear traps and enraged bee hives that could have really put a crimp on my plans. I’ll make no promises (see disclosure), but if you read this blog and take the ideas into consideration as you make your own financial plans, I believe that you will be well on your way to catching the Financial Freedom Express.
All aboard.