three main challenges in our personal finance..

In the course of your personal financial concerns, you face three main challenges -- three mountains of expense that you must scale and conquer to provide yourself and your family a decent life. The first is buying your home. If you doze off slightly in the ensuing years, you'll be brought up short by the second mountain looming in the middle distanse: financing your children's college. If you haven't been saving for it, you and your kids may be running up considerable debt for years to come. It is a worthwhile investment, though
Now for the challenge to end all challenges. You don't even have time for a brief nap before this Everest starts staring you down: financing your retirement. This is the supreme test that will take more energy and attention than the two peaks combined. Proof: Most retirees today must plan to live for 30 years after the paycheck stop.

. . .

Why should you bother investing at all when your neighbourhood bank is a nice, safe place to put your money? The answer: inflation and taxes. If your savings, after taxes, doesn't grow faster than the cost of living, its purchasing power will steadily erode.

Reference:
The MONEY Book of Personal Finance by Richard Eisenberg

See also:

1. GST inflation : the second wave

biow the market indicator

- When pensioners, security guards, cleaning ladies, and 9-year-old students try to get into the stock market, the crash can't be too far behind. This is starting to sound eerily like 1929, just before the (first) Great Depression, when bellboys, doormen and parking attendants were trying to get into the stock markets too.

As some wise ones have said, history doesn't really repeat itself, but it often rhymes. "This time is different," the not-so-wise ones have often retorted. Famous last words.

Above quoted from EM..

I was telling EM that I want to buy stocks.. and asked him how.. "why are you suddenly interested?.. it's very disturbibg.. the market is going to crash.."

*yay*.. i'm that influential.. when i the aunty try to get into the stock market.. the crash is coming.. *sigh*..

my only intention is to grow the little money i have.. i told EM and my frens, when i have 50k savings, i will quit working.. yea, right.. wishful thinking i can have, right?.. but recent reading tells me that.. my 50k will be eaten up by inflation so much so that my 50k wun really be 50k.. anyway, i'm so not an arts (biz, econs, accounts, etc) student.. but i must take the first step to at least make some sense out of investments.. it's especially hard when gossips and mundane stuff are so much easier to digest than say "market capitalization, large-cap, small-cap, price to revenue, over- or undervalued, PE ratio, cash flow, portfolio, etc, etc, etc.."..

so, towards BFF I pledge - BFF is my coin term for Biow Freedom Fund, .. *AZA AZA Fighting*