It has been a rough week on the stock market for investors as fear has jumped into the market. Literal *trillions* of dollars worth of value has dropped out in less than 5 days. While that in and of itself can be pretty scary, There are always things that you can work on in your financial life to continue moving towards FI.
Pay Off More Debt
Now is a great time to look even closer at any debt that you have and what you can do to pay it off. Paying off debt is one of those things that you don't ever lose on. The debt will not magically come back, it is taking the chains off of yourself to allow you to do more with what you have.
Invest in Yourself
Maybe you are an aspiring FI follower who should take another look at that blog and start posting more articles. Or maybe you started training on a particular subject that you are passionate about but had to call it off for a bit. Now would be a great time to look critically at those things that are closer to you than the stock market and make an investment in yourself.
What I'm doing
I follow the markets very closely and as a result, the week so far has been very painful. I have a 5% portion of my portfolio that I use for testing out new investment vehicles. This week I have lost close to 33% of the value in that portion which is hard to experience. This is the reason it is so small of a portion of my overall holdings. Yes, the loss is painful but overall the health of my portfolio is still intact. I have holdings in investments I plan to hold literally for my entire life and those are the things that will catapult me to FI. This is a good lesson in why you can hit home runs on some investments sometimes but it is my belief that a solid, long term portfolio is the way to go for peace of mind and long term wealth generation. Unless you think McDonald's, Coca Cola, Johnson and Johnson, Google, Apple, Microsoft, and a host of other blue chips are going to stop making money (I really don't think so). Bonus, I get to carry that knowledge forward in my investing career so that loss carries at least some value going forward.
Depending on the rest of the week I may be folding my Alternative Derivatives portion of my portfolio to buy into some long term stocks and weather the storm. Time will tell how that might work out but the Stock Options I was trading well last year took a serious nosedive in a week's time and that is signal enough for me to look elsewhere. Let me know if you made any moves this week and what your thoughts are on the current drop. The more we talk to each other the more informed we become. Happy Investing!
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