instepwithcolleen

Well it’s Thursday. The roads were a sheet of ice around my place, and I couldn’t get snow tires until after 3PM so I stayed home. This allowed me to work with my husband doing stocks. Yep. You heard me right ladies and gentlemen, doing stock trading. I am a firm believer in Suze Orman’s philosophy that EVERYONE should and can take charge of their finances.

I go crazy when I talk with professional women who tell me they don’t know anything about their retirement accounts,or investing. You have the capacity to manage your own funds. I have been most fortunate to have a husband who likes to talk about how you invest, and is willing to share his knowledge with me. I have been able, through his day trading position to learn how to buy and sell stocks.

I am especially surprised when  single women in their forties or fifties tell me that they don’t know how much they get for overtime, how much their employer puts into their retirement account, let alone where their money is even invested. Wake up! Any man or woman who has any kind of pension needs to know what and where their retirement is invested. You need to know if you can have any input into the types of funds your retirement account is in. If you don’t know, then honey, you will indeed be living on a fixed income when, and IF you can ever retire. In my job as an RN at a large university hospital a nurse with twenty years experience is making about $41/hour. That aint hay in any career. I just about fainted when  a fifty five year old nurse told me not too long ago, that they had been underpaid for 10 YEARS, and because they weren’t keeping track of this, they LOST 8 years of that short  fall into their retirement account. This is sheer STUPIDITY.

I would encourage you to get some good reading material. I recommend you get Toni Turner’s book, “A Beginner’s Guide to Day Trading online.” I then recommend you get yourself signed up for some classes about finances, at a junior college, or take one on line. You can do this. Even if you don’t feel like you can trade stocks yourself, you can understand why the economy is having hard times. You can understand budgeting and will be surprised at the smarts you have.

So Even if your days aren’t perfect, get going!! We made $600, then went in the hole for another stock, but we have added that to our portfolio. PS That is another word you will come to understand if you stop downgrading yourself, and educate yourself about finances. Suze Orman is right. No one is excused from finances 101 folks. This should be mandatory as a freshman class. So get out there, you all, take the bull by the horns. I know you can do it!