What Is The Best Financial Decision You Have Ever Taken

As we grow up we at times look back or retrospect on some of our past decisions. While some are very regrettable with obvious consequences, some makes us happy. what are some of such financial decisions that you are happy you made.

Mine was my financial investment in acquiring skills in website development. This makes me continuously relevant no matter where i am.

you can share yours too.

 

I took my best financial decision recently when I decided to establish two income streams. One is to finance my recurrent expenditure which accrues from a small laundry and the other one is to line my savings which accrues from online work. I don't have to feel the pinch associated with savings and I am now looking to establish a third income stream for the long term aspirations like retirement.

 

A few come to mind ....

• Tracking everything in my financial world with a personnel computer.
• Living well below my means and saving everything I could.
• Investing everything I could in good mutual funds.
• Avoiding debt as much as humanly possible.
• Starting retirement investing my early 20s.

 

We were renting a house for 8k pesos a month. After 5 years, we decided to get a bank loan to buy a house. What we could afford is a house in the suburbs. We were able to buy a 20-year old house that we fixed. The bank mortgage installment was 11k pesos and add to that the additional expenses for travel since we are now out of the city. That was in 2001. We are now done with the mortgage and it's a nice feeling to have our own home with no more rental or installment every month.

 

To retire from the military to work in the private sector.

 

A Book called "Wealth Without Risk" gave me an entirely different view of finances and the best advice that is in it is EVERYONE needs to start a small family business. A business offers, at least in America, a legal way to shelter lots of your income from taxes. It also gave a more realistic view of what exactly wealth is. Real wealth is determined by how much money you still have at the end of the month and all of your bills are paid. MANY people that you think are pretty well off are actually just head over heals in debt. It teaches you how to achieve true wealth and then what to do with it once you have it.

Tied with this was something an old man told me once that had a huge effect on my life. It was real simple. "If you don't know where you are going, don't be surprised when you don't get there!" He told me to sit down with my wife and decide exactly what our life would be like in 5-10-20- 30 years if all our dreams came true. He told us to dream big. After that any time that you had a major life and financial decision to make you chose the one that best pointed you in that direction.

We have actually LIVE that dream and still are. We basically bugged out over 30 years ago. What we discovered in our case was that our dreams weren't about being rich. We wanted to be happy and secure in a place that offered us an environment that was good for raising our kids. We sort of wanted to move to Mayberry and I wanted to open my version of Emmett's fix-it shop and work for myself and for people that could be more like friends than just customers. My wife wanted to get out of the big city and into a smaller place and wanted to find a career that would get her out of the minimum wage jobs she was stuck in.

We live in the country outside of a town population 500 that is 15 miles from a town that has 30,000 and everything we need. My wife went to college and is a Dental Hygienist. She is retired from working for the state and now works two days a week as a self employed dental temporary making 40 an hour. I started Dansco (Dan's Company) Repairs and did exactly as I had wanted to. I'm now retired but still work for my many friends that started out as customers. My kids live on the same piece of land that I own and I see my grand daughter, Danni every day and pick her up from school most days. Life just doesn't get better!!

It wasn't an accident!!

 

I can't say that I've made too many financial decisions in my life. Though I'm still pretty young.

A year ago after I graduated high school my boyfriend and I bought a fixer upper and lived in it as we fixed it up. It took a lot of our savings but with the work we put into it its value tripped; so we bought another fixer upper close to my parents and are renting out the other one.

 

I married a trauma surgeon.

 

Also one of my better thoughts was when I bought gold and silver in 1999 just in case the Y2k thing caused problems. At that time gold was going for $256.00 an ounce and silver was at $8.00 an ounce.

 

Buying land

 

As above. Paying my house and land off. Freedom!

 

Learning to live within my means and not taking on a lot of unnecessary debt....paying off what I owed.

or as Paul M aptly states...Freedom.


Also finally finding a woman who is not high maintenance.


Debt can become slavery if you let it get away from you.

So too can be a high maintenance woman.


Oh...TExdanm...I too bought back then...still buy on occasion.

Also invest in copper , brass and lead.


My .02

Watcherchris

Not an Ishmaelite.

 

When I was 21 my parents helped me buy my first house, I've never looked back and still buy houses today.

 

After many years of spinning my wheels and getting nowhere I finally found the right broker. My portfolio has done remarkably well since I made that change. There are a few stocks I would recommend. They are "buy and keep forever" stocks. They pay a nice dividend, and have done quite well. I wish I had bought them a lot sooner.

 

I guess there were two, not counting selling my suburban home and moving to farm country in Idaho.

The first was when I signed up at my employer for the maximum company match 401(k) plan in 1990. It was a sliding scale, but it maxed out at 100% of 6% of my pre-tax income. Back then, McDonnell Douglas also had a pension plan (completely company-funded) so I figured the 401(k) was gravy. After the merger with The Boeing Company, I rolled it over and kept on stuffing the money in. I retired in 2012 and was pretty well off.

My brother and I bought a ten-acre parcel near Prescott, Arizona in late 1998 for cheap, punched in a well and installed a PV water-pump with an elevated tank (we were beginning to get a little antsy about Y2K about that time). By early October 1999 we'd realized that most of the remediation was already in place and Y2K wasn't going to be much (fortunately, we guessed right). One other individual who couldn't see why I was being so stupid as to sell my property, bought it for $130k, which was almost a $90k more than we'd put into it.

 

After turning 60k into 30k day trading in stocks in 2001-2002, closed the brokerage account and put it all into physical gold (American Eagles and Canadian Maple Leafs) at an average of $310 an oz. Since I haven't sold any it's still an unrealized gain, but so far so good.