In It For Years

One thing you don't want to do is to buy a stock just to be in it for days.  And then sell it.  This is known as swing trading.  I don't like day trading and I don't like swing trading.  I like the Dave Ramsey baby steps approach.  Good solid mutual funds looking for about 10 percent per year.

The problem with me is that I didn't get started until late in the game.  If underprivileged kids were taught this from the get go they might stand a fighting chance.  I don't think too many kids graduating high school have a debt problem yet but the system is fixing to take care of that real quick.

If they came out of high school with oh hell at least $10,000 in today's dollars and a good understanding of the stock market and crypto currency that would even be that much better.  Every kid has to get a job in 7th grade and has to put every penny into an investment fund.  Starting out with a 401k or Roth IRA.  Dave knows all of the things to do.  In fact he has it all lined out in his Financial Peace University course.  

And then I'd get them into coding bootcamps and teach them all how to code.  Reading and writing and arithmetic would need to be ground into their heads in grades one through five.  When you come out of high school you go straight in to a coding job until you can pay for any University Program that you can afford to pay for in cash without having to borrow any money.

Ah the perfect world.  Some kids would look at my life and say man you had it made in the shade and I did.  And so did Michael Jackson and so did Whitney Houston and Ryan Leaf and Jim Morrison.  They all had it made and ended up killing themselves.  You could look at endless stories of rich kids born with silver spoons in their mouths that turned out to be miserable failures.  So we are all left right where we are.  

But the nice thing about this school of opportunity for underprivileged kids is that there is no charge to be a student here and you can go to the school from anywhere that you have an internet connection.  And the hours are the same as 7-11.  Open 24 hours per day.  If the 7-11 is open then the school of opportunity for underprivileged kids is open.

There are many such like organizations for providing opportunity for and helping underprivileged kids and all kids from all backgrounds and my hat is off to all of them.  I have not seen one yet that has a financial literacy focus like the Dave Ramsey Financial Peace program.

I can pretty much say that at the moment I have financial peace.  I have completed baby step 7 and now at 58 years of age many would look at me and say I'm set for life.  And I am, good Lord willing and the creek don't rise.  You never know what's going to happen but the better off financially you are the better off you are.  Many callers on the Dave Ramsey show have tales of woa to put my poor-me-baby stories to shame.

Dave makes it seem like once you have completed baby step 7 that is the pinnacle of success.  Yes it is a great milestone but should be achieved by the time you are 20 years old.  Some would say you have to just let these kids be kids.  Yea maybe you're right.  What I'll do is just focus on myself because that is all I have control over at the moment.  

And I don't really have that much control over my own situation.  I make the salary that I make and I have hit the ceiling.  That is exactly where many people who complete baby step 7 find themselves.  I would say probably the majority of people never even complete baby step 7.  Right here in the greatest country in the world.  It's a beautiful thing.

So there is baby step 7 at twenty years of age and there is baby step 7 at 58 years of age.  Two different animals.  And if a kid were to be able to complete a blockchain coding certification program and land a job in blockchain computer programming at 20 years of age he might even be making more than I am at 58 years of age.  And then there is baby step 7 at different levels of income.  Depending on how much you make on your job puts you at different levels of baby step 7.

A guy that is making $200 thousand per year is going to be at a different degree of baby step 7 than a guy who is making $50 thousand per year at baby step 7.  So you buy your stock and hold.  Life is a gamble and the days are just so many bets.  The winners walk out laughin', the losers say deal again.

There was a kid in Denver, Colorado.  He was the great grandson of one of the richest men in the history of Denver.  Claude Boetcher.  The grandkid had inherited a fortune and was just a playboy around town and drinking and partying all day every day.  A real good-for-nothin'.  The kind of guy we all wish we could be when we're 20 years old.  Or at least I did.  

One night he was driving home drunk and he hit and killed a news reporter on the interstate.  They identified parts from his one of a kind exotic sports car in the next day or so after the crash.  By this time he was holed up in his million dollar home watching the news reports.  He saw that they were coming for him and he shot himself dead.

He had inherited millions of dollars at 18 years of age and that's how his story ended.  So money is not everything.  And if you are really interested in getting down to the heart of the matter tune in to Jonathan Shuttlesworth in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.  It will be interesting to see what he ends up doing with his church there.