Begin Saving and Become Free
My name is Gianni Toce. I am the newest investment advisor representative and Special Needs consultant at Toce Financial Group. Due to a tragic firework accident when I was a child, I’ve spent the past 14 years of my life without eyes. OK I have eyes, but they are made of ceramics and only exist as a prosthetic. My mission is to help those with disabilities grow their wealth and achieve financial freedom. Despite all its faults, this is why I am endlessly grateful I live in our modern society. Innovations like the internet and the I-phone have evened out the playing field, and I hope I can even it out just a tad bit more with my blog “The Blind Seer”, because being blind, or having any disability, simply makes life more difficult. I look at saving and investing as the single most powerful opportunity to dramatically improve your quality of life, and I do believe being blind provides some small advantages we can exploit for greater gains. It’s hard, and it will take work on your part, but, with my guidance, I promise you can do it.
Investing Is Not Only For The Rich
First of all, building wealth, and/or learning how too, is not just for finance nerds like myself. It’s not just for millionaires, it’s an extremely real possibility for everybody, and it’s simply a requirement to escape poverty. You must develop healthy financial habits in order to one day escape the rat-race. In other words, achieving a dignified retirement. How to do this can be summed up with one simple equation: Discipline = Freedom.
Become a disciplined spender, recognize the future value of today’s dollars, choose to delay gratification by saving and investing, and allow the magic of compound interest to begin working for you. I can’t supply one method that will work for everyone, to budget or reverse budget is up to you, but I can tell you with 100% certainty the time to start saving is now. How much and how often you sock away money is not nearly as important as when you start, because we are talking about commencing a lifelong habit of accumulating income producing assets. (more on this later)
In the equation for calculating compound interest, time is our exponential variable. The amount of time your money is invested has a far greater effect on your investment’s result. We aren’t getting any younger folks; we can’t go back in time and start earlier, but we can begin anew today. Stop buying things you know you don’t need. These purchases will have insignificant effects on your day to day happiness, but they will and do have a massive net effect on your net-worth in the decades to come. I challenge you to identify one product you buy every week or every day, then resist enjoying that product as often as you have in the past. If you buy a coffee 7 days a week, then from now on , purchase coffee 6 times a week and save the money you would’ve spent on the 7th cup of Joe. This way you can slowly but surely build your savings, and once you have an emergency fund (3-6 months of expenses), you continue saving, now investing your money, and begin building your investment portfolio. “Just Keep Buying” is a wonderful read recently published by Nick Maggiulli and it’s all about accumulating income producing assets. I highly recommend getting yourself a copy, because I can’t relay an entire book in one blog post, and I promise it’s a worthwhile investment. Suffice to say you’re better off owning assets like a business that will pay you a dividend as opposed to owning gold, or crypto, or art, because you theorize they’ll be more valuable in the future. This is essentially subscribing to the greater fool theory. Alternative investment classes can be tempting, but my job is to make investments based on mathematical certainties, and this necessitates avoiding temptations.
Being Blind Amidst an Advertising Onslaught
Avoiding temptations is paramount to investing success. Avoiding more minor temptations on a regular basis is paramount to success in your personal finances. This is where lacking vision can become a minor advantage, and it’s easy to see how. In today’s world, people are under a constant barrage of advertisements and thank goodness all those adds aren’t accessible. I smile every time I’m forced to hear a YouTube ad that fails to voice the name of the company or product aloud, because I know the product was likely something I didn’t need, and the company failed to capture even a minuscule amount of my attention. I smile because I understand the future value of money, and spending fewer dollars now guarantees exponentially more dollars to spend for future Gianni. Delaying gratification; trading what you could have right now for far more in the future; that’s the name of the game. That is investing at its finest. Being visually impaired might be a minor advantage, but when we exploit minor advantages for long periods of time they compound to have major outcomes. I spoke of dollars since I happen to live in the United States, but the concept does not change across currencies or cultures. The math is universal and all peoples share the same psychological tendencies.
Conclusion
In conclusion, we all must become masters of our impulses. Developing the discipline to save and invest is a requirement for freedom. investing is for everyone regardless of financial knowledge, background, or experience. We can all learn enough to be responsible with our money despite financial or physical circumstances. automatic ad avoidance is just one example of flipping your mindset and turning a negative into a positive. Does it actually make me wealthier? Who could say, but it makes me happy and that is truly valuable. If you think you might be stuck in a negative mindset surrounding your finances, then adopt the longterm perspective essential to investing success, and begin the journey by stacking small positive choices again and again. I encourage you to take the first step towards your financial goals by identifying one area where you can cut back on spending and start saving and investing. With the power of compound interest and a long-term mindset, you can start building a brighter financial future for yourself today.