What's the best investment I can make?

Hello friends and neighbors, welcome back to the Luminous Journey.  Last week we talked budgets, and got a pretty good idea of just how expensive this epic road trip is going to be.  So, now we’ve got to figure out how to pay for it all.  We’re talking investments.  Before we get started I have to say though, I am not a financial expert, and none of this is financial advice.  Don’t buy or sell anything based on what I have to say, find someone in a suit.  I want to give you some idea of what we’ve been doing to try to grow our money, and maybe get some ideas from you all as well.  

First of all, we have to take a look at our goals.  We’re trying to grow our money fast.  A ten-year bond is just not going to do that, so that does somewhat limit our options.  It also brings a lot of risk.  A basic truth of investing is that the greater the potential reward, the greater the risk.  So yeah, essentially what we’re doing is going to be a terrible idea if you’re looking to set up a retirement fund.  Think of the high risk/high reward options we have.  You’ve got the lottery, which is essentially a 99.99999% chance of total loss, but the jackpot this week is like a billion dollars.  Really all forms of gambling are pretty similar.  Fortunately, we’re not to the point where we need to throw a hail mary like this one.  

We could look at stock options, and other leveraged plays.  The hard part about that is that we just don’t have the background or knowledge base to make that a winning strategy.  We also don’t want to lose our shirts, so leveraged investments seem like they’re still a bit on the risky side for us.  I don’t want to feel out of our depth when we’re talking about our life savings.

So we got started like so many folks did, spending pandemic weekends reading Yahoo Finance to find the next Tesla or Apple.  We invested small amounts, and actually made a decent return with all the volatility that was happening.  We gained something like 35% in a year and a half.  That’s a phenomenal return for a typical stock market investment.  We even got lucky enough to get almost all of it out before things came back down to earth.  But to be frank, 35% just won’t cut it for what we need to do.  We were earning well, but didn’t have a ton of savings.  We really needed to turn something like $60,000.00 into $350,000.  Highly unlikely we could get 35% every year, and even if we could that would take 6 years.

So our lack of patience led us to the gold mine of our generation… Crypto.  The timing there couldn’t be better.  We started in mid 2020, and by the end of 2021 we saw ridiculous returns, like 800%.  We were crazy close to our goal, checking every day to see when we hit it so we could cash out and hit the road.  And then the bottom dropped out.  We’re still up a couple hundred percent, but not quite where we need to be yet.  We continue to wait patiently, but there’s no way of knowing where that will go or how long it will take to get there.  

That brings us to the most important investment we’ve made, and the one that I can recommend to every single person watching this today.  That is the investment I made in myself.  All the investments I listed before this are largely out of my hands, I can’t control when a company will post a bad profit statement, or what will happen with interest rates, or which crypto company will get sued.  No matter how much I read of how often I check, I’m just constantly getting surprised by random events.  

So, if you want something done right, do it yourself.  I can say conclusively that if I give myself this money, I will give 100% effort to make sure that I will work tirelessly to create a business that generates a return on that investment.  Of course, I can’t say with certainty that I’ll succeed, but at least I’ll succeed or fail on my own terms, not the terms of some Wall Street goon.  

From the beginning, from the birth of The Luminous Eye, I have invested in professional quality gear.  The key word there is invested, not spent.  If I think of spending $10,000.00 on a camera, it’s like a crazy thing to do.  But if I think of investing $10,000.00 in a professional grade tool, that will help me to do the quality of work that I believe is necessary to compete in today’s market, it now sounds perfectly logical.  If I think of quitting my job to take photographs, it sounds frivolous.  But if I think of giving myself the time I need to focus on and grow my business, it becomes reasonable and completely the right thing to do.  I truly believe that these investments will come back to me with interest.

This is the most powerful lesson I’ve learned through this entire investment process:  Trust yourself, trust that you have the drive, determination, and ability to make yourself a success.  As long as you’ve got a passion, and you’ve got will, you, and I, will make it.

And of course there’s the one last investment that you’re familiar with.  The time that I’m investing in all of you, to create the best Youtube channel I possibly can.  I invest something like 25 hours a week into my videos, and if you wouldn’t mind investing just three clicks - Like, Subscribe, and Notify, then it will all be worth it.  Thank you all for your attention, and support.  It’s so exciting to know that we’ll all get to witness the payoff together.  Have a bright and focused week.

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