What credit crunch?
Finally got around to my first post for the new year. I gave the credit card a good workout during the holidays, which has left me wondering “what credit crunch?”. There were thousands of people out and about buying stuff and “stimulating the economy”. You even have the sales assistants at big department stores saying that they have had the busiest Boxing Day sales ever. I guess the biggest losers out of last year were the bankers, and rightly so. They have been bad boys and girls, and ought to have received sacks of coal from Santa for Christmas.
I also gave my financial planner the flick. The downturn in the economy was a blessing in disguise. Basically it showed me that financial planners are nothing more than glorified sales people. They know very little more about financial markets than you, except for the financial products that they get big kick backs for from funds managers. Investing is not complicated nor time consuming if you take the effort to do your own independent learning on financial markets. I thought I would be too busy to look after my personal finances, so I outsourced it to a financial planner. That turned out to be the worst mistake I’ve made, but I’ve learned from it and moved on. The first rule of investing should be never relinquish control of your finances. Now I am free to invest in what I like without the millionaire’s factory taxing me for doing sweet FA.
