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Financial Resume: Investments

This was written back in 2007 a year before I got laid off. I was cockier about my Financial Resume at the time. I am glad I bought banks back then because I lost money with Nortel.

As my regular readers can tell, I speak frankly about some of my more enormous blunders in life, and my investing “strategies” have to be my biggest failure in my financial resume.

Let me see if I can make a scorecard on this one:

Positive

  • Bought banks in 2003 with money that was left from High Tech bubble implosion, and those banks have been a god send in my RRSPs. They have grown and I only really bought them for their dividends, but that has to be the best decision I have made (with my wife, I’d like to point out).
  • I get my matching funds from my company’s Deferred Profit Sharing Plan, and I have not touched that money yet. I have invested it badly, but I have not spent the money either, and it is starting to recover slowly. (effectively get an extra 3% a year for this in retirement funds).
  • Created RESPs for my kids, and the funds in there have stayed there, and I will not touch them. The money is growing ok, but I am most proud of not taking any out yet either. The one gift you can give your kids is an education!
  • Have been able to save almost 7% of my salary for a while in RRSPs, so I do have a nest egg of sorts.
EQ Bank Savings Account
No Bank Fees here though

Negative

  • Road High Tech stocks like Slim Pickens all the way down. I knew it was happening, yet I couldn’t pull the trigger and take my losses, and when I finally did, I stayed away for a good long time, which is a kind of good thing. I work for a high-tech company, so a lot of my built-in retirement stuff from the company went in the toilet at this time too. This is the stupidest thing I have done financially. In the immortal words of a fellow high-tech worker, “I drank the Kool-aid”, when they kept saying, “It will come back, really!”. No matter how many positives I can think about myself, this one is SO negative, I cannot recover.
Boom goes the High Tech Bubble
Ride it Down!

Overview

So there you have my view of my investments. There is no need to go over individual wins or losses regarding specific security; there is no point in that.

My investing is getting better, I have made some classic blunders, but I am slowly learning from my mistakes, which is essential.

My financial resume isn’t bad after all, it’s nothing fantastic, and I know people who have been able to set up a plan and live to it and are much farther ahead of me, but I am doing as well as I can now, so that is all I can wish for now.

Financial Resume

Feel Free to Comment

  1. Been there, done that, learnt the same experiences and mistakes, many in the high-tech industry have… good luck with your investing 🙂

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