Building Wealth Slowly

Description: Building Wealth Slowly is really not so much a book about investing strategies in personal finance as it is a book about strategies for coping with the psychology of situations when events turn against you, in part because of variables that turned against you that were outside your personal control. However, this book also provides a series of keys for building wealth. Here are some of the ideas contained in this book. 1. Most people spend far too great a percentage of their incomes on things that will likely depreciate not appreciate over time. By not allocating some of their income to assets that may appreciate, a lot of people rule out the possibility of ever becoming wealthy. It is impossible to become wealthy without giving up some current consumption.2. No one has ever built wealth by buying a motor vehicle. Virtually none of the new motor vehicles being sold today will ever become valuable collectibles. Cutting expenditures for motor vehicles is a most important way to get money that can be invested to build wealth.3. Gold coins are not likely the best place to store and build wealth, in spite of the TV ads. If the economy is bad, people will not have enough money to eat let alone bid up the price of gold to record levels. Gold just sits there, and does not provide any useful service. Even stores of value can decline in price. 4. Any item sold by a private company with the word "Mint" in its name will never become a valuable collectible. Nearly all items sold by companies as collectibles will not even hold their value, let alone increase in value. It is a fool's game to try and become wealthy by buying items from companies that sell these things. The company that sells you the item might do well, but not you.5. Diamonds increase in value. The problem is that jewelry stores sell them at huge markups, so it may be the 20th anniversary before the diamond is worth more than it cost just before the wedding. The people who make money investing in diamonds have specialized knowledge and skills.6. Residential real estate can be a wealth builder, but is as not risk-free as people thought before 2007. Houses can and do go down as well as up in value, and making money on a house can be difficult. To make money, you need to know not only about general trends in your town or city, but also what is happening in your subdivision and even street7. Farmers can build wealth in farmland over long periods of times, but the value of farmland sometimes drops substantially and for long periods of time too. In the 1980s, a lot of farmers lost a lot of money in farmland. Owning farmland is no quick route to become wealthy.8. A simple S&P 500 index fund is usually not the best way to invest in the stock market. If you want to invest in an index fund, for the reasons outlined in the book there are better indices than the S&P 500, options which will give you greater returns with less long-term volatility. 9. A terrible idea to buy stocks when prices are soaring, and then turn around and sell stocks just when share prices fall off a cliff. The opposite is a far better wealth-creation strategy, but most people have great difficulty doing that. It is psychologically tough to buy stocks when prices have fallen a lot, but a rising market can be really tough to resist. 10. The undesirable effects of price fluctuations in the stock market can be minimized with careful and thoughtful diversification. The book contains many ideas with respect to how to diversify and reduce your downside risks while maintaining a good rate-of-return."Successfully building wealth requires discipline to spend money on things that can appreciate not depreciate over time, courage to follow your own ideas, patience to see your investments through, as well as a stubborn determination to become far wealthier ten years from now than you are today."