Stock Markets - 4

Dear Friends!

There were ever so many incidents with stocks and dealing in them for 35 years! Yet I can say profits made on all those longterms investments got wiped out on all short trading losses. So it all evened out with more spiritual riches than the material kind :D

Once a friend who pitched in large amounts of money alongwith my sister during crisis time used to comment that he would feel secure if it were landed assets and not ones on mere piece of paper. He was so right.

In olden times our elders used to lock up their investments either in gold or land/house. In Tamil this is expressd very nicely in just 2 words which has loaded meaning! "Ponno, manno"
This means either gold or land. As both were considered as tangible assest anyday.

Right from my college days I would wear the minimum of gold on my person. I would hate stocking up on gold and would never visit jewellery shops frequently so there used to be hardly any money sunk into gold for me.

More on gold in subsequent posts, god willing.

Since the year 2004-05 my focus has been more on real estate and with a list of what to look out for so that I dont get cheated where legalities or otherwise of documents are concerned.

It dawned on me that for everyone the same rule applies. It is easy to get or inherit wealth but very difficult to safe keep it for ourselves and pass it down to our next generation. In the reverse it is so easy to lose wealth due to quick decisions we make. We are secretive about money matters as families become nuclear units. There are no elders' advice sought for fear of this or that. These are days of consultants. They go by any fancy name which can attract clients to them. Sure they do have good knowledge about schemes and how much returns our money can get us. But no actual gaurantees on our investments at all. The risk is all ours and fees are all theirs for the advice. Our elders would sound out caution each time, even though we would get angry at such interference and poking their nose in our affairs yet it did make us think and we did have another view point before sinking our money. Now friends are turned to for such sounding out. If the friend is sincere, knowledgeable and you mkae money out of his advice, then it is worth.
If the friend does not know much and still gives advice and we follow, only to lose money.
We lose both money and friendship too!

These are days of marketing everything by known good firms and unknown with promises of high yeilding returns. It is this fine line which we should look out for. Whenever there is a promise of some very high returns than the normal which a bit higher than the bank returns then there is every chance that you will be lucky if you get back your capital intact. In some cases the high returns are paid promptly initially and then the company does the disappearing act! Say you parted with Rs.10000/- and the company paid you monthly returns of Rs.2000/- for a couple of months. Then the third month it is time you kissed your investment good bye. You can forget Rs.6000/- or run round in circles spending an additional Rs.6000/- trying to recover the balance!

By this time our BP and sugar would also keep pace with such events. Our rounds to the doctor and running several tests and buying medicines to treat a disease which the doctor finds it very hard to diagnose!! Since we have anyway come to him/her the doctor will prescribe some tests and medicines too without actually curing our problem of how to get back our lost investments!

Is this not a vicious enough cycle. By the time we realise or come across wise counsel many grey hair would have started appearing to make us appear wiser!!

I have been counselling many people all these years from my own experience. I am sharing these in my blogs in an open manner as its so easy to write what I feel about it all.

I am past all the bitterness of losing. I am past regretting the past. I am past blaming someone else for my own mistakes. The day I cut myself from it all I made my peace. I knew from then on there was no further loss to make, no further blaming anyone else but I knew it will take a while to regain lost health, many more sleepless nights and much more days of working to keep earning money.

The moral of today's story is - it is very easy to lose money and very hard to earn it. It is easy to sell but very difficult to buy later. It is easy to inherit wealth but it is very difficult to safe keep in our life times.

Or perhaps we are all just trustees of what we think is our hard earned money. God makes us pass it on in our lifetime to many people in different forms of expenses - some people we know and some whose face also we may never have our eyes on!
Is this what we call our karmas and try to calm our mind of the junk called thoughts of regret!

Move on oh human. We have one life to live. Let us lead that with peace and good health. Let us make others happy. What we lose is not really ours. Let us not blame others for our own mistakes. God has given us thinking abilities to set us apart other creatures. Let us try and lead a simple life. A life with less complications. Where our needs match what we make.

Cheers!
Mahalakshmi