How well off will you be when you can no longer earn a living or you were forced to retire? Millions of people who have retired or were retired from the workforce are having a truly difficult time trying to support themselves these days because they made the wrong investment decisions when they were working.
Saving a whole lot of money will not guarantee that you will have a comfortable lifestyle after your earning years have come to an end. The reason being is that it requires more dollars today in which to purchase the same amount of goods and services that you purchased ten years ago or even last year. The rate of inflation within the economy each year is the cause for the loss of the purchasing power of every dollar that you saved in the past.
Then again, only a fool gambles away his or her hard earned money and/or puts his or her accumulated savings at risk by making poor investment decisions. Like it or not, putting your money in a bank is a poor investment decision because the bank pays less interest than the current rate of inflation within the economy. Solution, purchase tax exempt bonds, which, by the way, yield a far greater return from your investment.
Keep in mind that your goal is to retain the purchasing power of your accumulated savings and even add to that retirement nest egg as time passes. It is a fact that prices and wages are not downwardly mobile, due to the fact that there are a whole lot of truly greedy people who are alive on Earth.
So too, putting all of your retirement nest eggs in one basket is also a stupid thing to do. Most truly rich people also purchase tangible Real and personal property that will also appreciate in value as time passes. More often than not, the value of such property increases at the same rate or more as the yearly rate of economic inflation. As an example: Gold is now valued at more than $1,600.00 per ounce and the price of silver is 300% more today than it once was a few years ago.
The best time to buy such tangible real and/or personal property is during depressed economic periods within any economy. The reason being that the value of such property decreases in the short term or during the entire depressed economic period. Unemployed and/or financially desperate people will sell whatever they have for whatever they can get just to remain healthy and alive. In the meantime, because of the rate of inflation that occurs during most depressions, the value of precious metals increases.
You want to or your goal should be to retain or increase the buying power of your accumulated savings. That is why truly rich people purchase works of art, jewelry and other collectibles that will, most likely, increase in value as the dollar, in the case of the economy of the United States of America, decreases in value. The people of many countries on Earth now are living within depressed economic times and you better believe that each of those people will do whatever it takes to preserve their accumulated wealth, no matter what they have to sell, just to remain healthy and alive for another day, week or month.
For every winner, there is one or more losers. That is no better reason why you should take full advantage of future gains to be derived from buying low and selling high. We are born into this world with nothing and that is how we will leave this reality. How well off do you want to be before you pass away?