Doing things the Old School Way
As kids, my dad made sure he tried his best in making us see the importance of saving money. He even went so far as to reward me back then for having the most amount of savings amongst my siblings. This was money I had saved up by starving myself and making sure not to make use of my pocket money whenever I was in class.
Sadly, as we got older, the narrative began to slowly change; it went from saving us to investing is the way. And I'm not saying any of it was wrong, just that I went into it without a proper game plan. You see, when it comes to saving your money, there is almost zero risk attached to it because you know what you have and you know your money is going nowhere.
Unlike investing your money, which comes with a good amount of risk, it all just depends on the type of investment. Well, unfortunately for me, rather than diversifying, I went all in on one of those options, and that was partly because I didn't have a lot of money to begin with, and I was hoping that doing one could help me do both later in the future.
So I invested and was hoping to make some profit like everyone else, so that when that happens, I could then take some out of it and save that while the other half would still be left as an investment. Unfortunately, things didn't go as planned, as a lot of things crashed this year, and now all of my investments are nothing but just numbers on the screen with no figures attached to them.
To be honest, it wasn't totally unexpected; I just didn't expect things to get this bad. But I'm not a neighbor to all this, and I wouldn't even talk about it if it wasn't for the bad timing. And I say that because this time of the year is usually the time when everyone gets their shit together and is careful with what and how they spend because in about two months time, you will be paying some very important bills.
Anyway, I've surely learned my lesson, and I will be going back to the old ways, which is saving while occasionally dabbling in little things that hopefully will be profitable in the future. If there's one thing I learned, it is that sometimes it's not so bad keeping things the old-school way.