How to Self Investing

Let talk about how to invest in ourselves since the last blog I mentioned that we should all invest in ourselves.

The first, and the most important thing is the health improvement. I found this a hard way since I’ve damaged my health due to some traumatic event in my life in the past. When we don’t have a healthy body, we won’t able to earn those incomes and catch our chance since we are weak. For example, there’s a hundred dollar bill on the ground, but you’ve hurt your back and are not able to grab it, then someone walks by you just knee down grab it, and walk away. Is this because we don’t have the luck? No! It’s because we didn’t take good care of ourselves and cause the luck go away and say good buy to our face. Let the past be in the past, and start improving our life. Study our body and find out what nutrition we need, and find a way to feed ourselves. Not all of us are in a good financial situation, but how to feed ourselves when we can’t afford it? It’s easy, now a day with technology, we can do a fundraiser on https://www.gofundme.org/ with your life happens story or go to the next-door neighbor phone app and ask for help, look around for community box (usually in front of church) and get the food you need from those community boxes, even talk to your friends and family see if they are able to give you some foods. Or even try to apply for food stamps from the government or look for non-profit organizations to get support. A Precious Child located at Broomfield, CO is a really good non-profit organization that helps a lot of families with children in hardships. Remember, we need enough nutrition to support a healthy body so that we can work and earn money for other things for life. So don’t be shame to ask for help with food.  For those who are in a good financial situation, I’ll suggest you go to your family do a full body check and bring your results to find professional nutrition to help you plan for your meals. You’ll be surprised how much money you save from staying away from a lot of sicknesses that cause by your consuming habits and even help you build a better body shape. Also, skincare for ladies is really important. That doesn’t mean we put anything that we think might help on our faces, and our faces are not trash cans. So please don’t try everything to find out what feels good. Please do some simple skin test and get what’s a good fit for yourself and use it to protect us from aging. Personally, I do skincare once a week on my own, and only use the SKII mask whenever I can afford, and use simple things like egg white, watermelon when I’m not able to afford the SKII mask. Every night after washing my face, I apply Johnson baby lotion to my face; and during the day, as from <<A Woman with A Plan>> suggestion, as a lady, we should apply skincare sunscreen to protect our face before we head out.

Reading and listening to audiobooks is the best way to improve ourselves. Do you know what is problems are? The problem is what happens in our lives that are not within our control areas. Our control areas will be expanded when we gain knowledge. Once our knowledge expanded to the problem, then we will be able to solve the problem, and there’s no more problem. —<<The road to Financial Freedom>> Books are the knowledge of wisdom that passes on, and we don’t need to only focus on only knowledge we are interested in. We could start on reading those areas that we are interested, and expand on other areas. Because <<Poor Charlie’s Almanack>> mentioned, we should learn and combine knowledge on our own and use it. Now a day, if those people are not focused on one area, then people will not accept them as professionals, but the knowledge that always has crossed over could be useful when we combine them together to use in our lives. Some people’s schedules are really packed, and I’ll suggest you start listening to audiobooks when you are driving, doing housework, even during workouts. I usually listen to the audiobook when I find out books that are interesting or recommend to read. After listening to the audiobook, I’ll design if that’s a book I would like to own and read on my hand, then earn money to buy it, read it again, and take notes that would be useful for me in life. Once a month, read your reading notebook to refresh the knowledge in your brain. You’ll be surprised that knowledge not only helps us solve problems in life but also give us confidence and hope in ourselves. Once a point in time, I lose hope in life and feel like a piece of shit all the time. And when I start reading again, I found out that my knowledge is growing, and able to solve more and more problems in life and able to help others. I stop asking “Why”, and start switching to the “How to make this work” mindset. I cut down a large amount of social life, and use it to read, learn, and study. Because I understand that better myself doesn’t happen overnight, such as the ice cube doesn’t melt nor change shape until reaches 32 degrees. Also, when we are not good enough, those high-level people won’t remember us. What’s the point to pay a high price to go to these events and taking a picture or two with them? I prefer someday those famous people talking about me over a picture with them. Because they will remember, oh Grace create artwork for me and I love it, I’ll recommend you to place a custom artwork with her because she’s amazing! However, I still have a long way to go because I’m not at the level of a well-known artist yet. Kevin Harrington & Ali Wong, right? lol, I’ll be really surprised and over warm with joy, if he or she will remember who I am! I also hope someday, I’ll be able to meet Morgan Freeman in person and hand him my artwork since he’s my favorite actor 🙂 Let’s see if I’ll make this dream come true someday!

A little side note, I do custom drawings to help with income and donations. If you are interesting, please feel free to place your order anytime. 🙂

Last but not least, financial plans are really important in life! Have you ever known if you combine all your assets, do you have money or are you in debt? If you don’t know, now it’s time to start your budget and plan for your future. Please take out of your Xcel sheet and mark down all your debts, your bank accounts amount, and assets such as IRA, mortgage income, investments income, and cash on hand. After marking down all the numbers, please sum up and see what is your current situation. Please don’t lose hope even if it shows you are in debt. Just like <<The road to Financial Freedom>> mentioned, we are not money, our value does not depend on the number of amounts on the dollar bill; we are a unique human being that has personality and other factors that defined us in different values. If your number is positive, congratulation! For those who want to improve life for the future, here’s some knowledge I’ve learned over the reading of multiple financial books and blogs that might be useful for you as well.

• Rich people always paid themselves first before they pay everybody. —<<Rich Dad Poor Dad>> Here’s what I think is the great formula as the following. Our income should use pay ourselves 10% to use for expenses such as food, gas, shopping, and travel, 10% for rainy day fund deposit, 20% for investment(such as 10% for IRA, and 10% for other investments), and 60% for bills such as rent/mortgage and all other stable monthly bills. 
• If you have debts, list out from the highest interest to the lowest interest and start to pay the highest until it is paid off, then move on to the next highest interest.
• Rainy day fund should have a few different rainy day fund deposit account. 1st account should be for 2 years of living expenses if you lost your job. The amount should be your monthly expenses x 12 x 2. Please also keep in mind with everything price update in time to adjust the amounts in your rainy-day fund account as well. 2nd & 3rd accounts are for house owners, you should have an account that has 3 years of mortgage payments if you lose your job, and a personal estimate amount if anything happens to your house that needs to be fixed or remodeled. The 4th rainy-day fund account should be for your life event(marry or funeral) or family members(such as parents or children). On the 5th account should be saving for investment when you’re not ready to invest yet.  Then the last saving account is optional and should be just saving for fun events such as traveling. 
• <<Poor Charlie’s Almanack>> mentioned, anything we don’t know about is not investing, is gambling. So before we invest, please do enough research and study before investing. Charlie has really great format when there are chances to invest, he categorize into 3 areas: Could Invest, I don’t know, and can not invest. When it falls into the “I don’t know” category, he will do research before he makes a decision of which category should be moved to. For investing, all the banks should have professionals(Wells Fargo calls them relationship bankers) that could give you more professional support. We should also read blogs about investment to gain more knowledge before investing. Fidelity and Wells Fargo are great websites to learn about financial advice.

Please feel free to comment below and give any suggestions. It’s my pleasure to communicate with you. Any good book recommendation will be greatly appreciated 😉

If you enjoy the cultural influence and would like to support the Asian local artist over metro North Denver who wants to help more people, feel free to PayPal graceyu.artstudio@gmail.com as your donation. Thanks for your support. Your support increases my motivation to create 🙂