5 non intuitive essentials for smart investing

Originally seen in Authority Magazine interview with Jason Hartman.


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• Pay yourself first. Before you can begin to invest you need to establish a discipline and a baseline for investing. The practice of paying yourself first involves taking a portion of your income and allocating it for your long term savings and investing plan BEFORE you spend any money on bills, luxuries, or otherwise. Many people mistakenly try to save after they have finished spending. Having a budget can help a lot with this as you will know exactly how much money you are bringing in and where it is going in case you need to trim some fat on spending.
• Investing in education. The difference between a gambler and an investor is education. Investing in education may look different for different people and can be cheap or expensive. There are many free resources available for education on virtually every type of investment strategy/ opportunity out there. There are also paid groups, courses, books, etc. that you can use to take your knowledge to the next level.
• Invest in yourself. When it comes to investing outside of the stock market you might need materials/supplies/expertise/resources that you don’t currently have. Maybe you want to start or buy a business. Maybe you want to produce an income generating asset like a book. These things require not only upfront investments, but also recurring investments of time and capital. Embracing the concept of investing in yourself (understanding potential risks and rewards first) will get your finished product to market faster and better while minimizing rework, can result in guidance from someone whose experience can save you on time and mistakes, or can simply get you into a room that you otherwise wouldn’t have had access to. Sometimes the intangible returns on investments far outweigh what you can count in your bank account.
• Know your market. This is taking your investment in education a bit further and can be applied to any form of investing previously mentioned. You want to understand the supply and demand of the potential investment and how you can capitalize on either people’s willingness to buy or sell that item. Whether that be stocks, real estate, cryptocurrency, or even a book you publish, understanding how much someone believes in, doesn’t believe in, wants, doesn’t want, can afford, or can’t afford that object will be important to how, when, and why you invest in it.
• Invest in your health. Seems super intuitive however once you get that investment bug, you may become so gung ho about investing that you forget to sleep, you don’t eat right, you don’t exercise, because you’re totally locked in. Besides the emotional strain investments can sometimes have resulting in increases in anxiety and even depression in the cases of investments gone wrong, you absolutely have to stop, breath, and take care of you. All of the investment success in the world won’t matter if you aren’t around or healthy enough to take advantage of it.