Investing Practice: The Creation

 Today I’m going to share about the creation of my investing practice. I hope it’ll inspire you to create your own investing practice, or at least get curious about creating one.

I’m writing this post 21 days after I started my investing practice. And can I say that my comfort and knowledge about investing has skyrocketed. Don’t get me wrong, I’m by no means an expert but I feel like me 21 days ago compared to today are two different versions of me.

I need to back the story up a bit here and fill in some details. 21 days ago I officially started my investing practice but my relationship with investing started many years ago.

I believe it was at the ripe old age of ten, I made my first investment. It was a GIC, or Guaranteed Investment Certificate (and yes, I had to google the name of it). I had been saving my money and was advised by my parents to invest it. So I took my hard earned money (aka, birthday money and allowance) and locked it into a GIC for 5 years. I can remember thinking this was really cool to be making money and I didn’t have to do anything.

So this was the mid - 90’s and interest rates were a lot higher than they are now meaning I actually made a couple hundred dollars on my first investment. It also meant that I had to go into the brick and mortar bank as computers and internet banking weren’t a common thing yet.

Fast forward 20 years and this one investment, when I was 10, was the only investment I had made in my life. Honestly I was quite proud of myself for making such a bold, adult decision when I was 10 but when I actually became an adult, I couldn’t seem to bring myself to repeat this decision.

Don’t get me wrong, I wanted to invest but I just didn’t. It had even become easier for me to invest as I had now been online banking for more than half my life, I had an investment account open with my bank and I had money in savings to invest but I just didn’t.

This seems like an appropriate time to talk a little about my financial blueprint. I will go in depth into what a financial blueprint is next month but here’s a condensed version. I was raised to want financial stability and to do this I accomplished this by getting a stable, well paying job and to save my money. Growing up, there was a lot of stress attached to money. It wasn’t me who was driving the purchase of a GIC when I was 10 and the conversations around money and investing were veiled with a lot of opinion (aka. emotion).

This stress that I associated mainly with investing led me to avoid it like the plague. I avoided talking about it, reading about it, thinking about it, overhearing conversations about it, etc. I took a real mature approach to it as I would expect most people would do when something is uncomfortable (just kidding… not really).

Almost 5 year ago I pulled up my big girl panties and decided that enough was enough and that “I need to invest”. So I took the easy route and hired a financial investor. Boom problem solved as now I’m an investor!

But something nagged at me. Maybe it’s the voice of my financial blueprint past saying “you’re wasting money by hiring someone to do something you can do yourself”, or maybe it was the fact that I’m paying this financial advisor a nice percentage of money whether they make me money or not but the nagging got louder.

Three months ago, it came to my attention that a friend was investing. This friend was discussing investing with me and there was no stress attached to the conversation. It was actually quite exciting which was the opposite of what these conversations have always been in the past.

They recommended some podcasts to listen to, some websites to check out and then lent me some of their books. So I started listening to one of the podcasts while I gardened and started making my way through the books.

Which brings me to now. I haven’t officially invested yet but I’m gearing up to do it and I’m actually excited. Which is not something I would have imagined saying about investing even 21 days ago. So welcome to my investing journey! I’m so happy that you’re here. Let's get started.

I’m curious, is investing something you’ve ever considered?