God IT FEELS GOOD TO BE BACK AT WORK!

[z-REX]

I'm in a similar boat, in theory. I set up a recording studio in my house and also have a record label in the very beginning stages, and a developing plan to grow both into successful businesses- all while my wife and I work to pay the bills and raise 2 kids! I'm 28 and she's 23, and we have a partner in the business who is also 28. It's a hard industry to get started in without prior name recognition but the goal is to create a body of work amongst ourselves that will hopefully attract clients to work with us. Fortunately, technological advances made startup costs VERY low and as the business grows, inevitably so will the gear list.

 

So why go through all this trouble? Simple... to work toward a career doing something we love that has the potential for a comfortable payoff in the end. (And, thus, a ton of money to sink into Z's!!!) The hardest part is maintaining day jobs to pay the bills and keep health insurance, time that could be spent making the business grow faster.

 

So what was the point of this story? It takes balls and sweat to do something like this, but the payoff of making nothing into something is a reward you just can't get punching someone else's clock. If we ever get the chance to meet up, Mike- I owe you a beer!

[cygnusx1]

You should have told me you were bored. I would have gladly given you my job and split the paycheck. You show up in place of me, work my job, I enjoy your retirement, and you get half my paycheck. Everybody wins!

[Michael]

In the spring of 2000 I also “saw it comingâ€, and reduced my exposure to the market considerably. So far, so good. But in late 2000, when companies such as Dell, Lucent, Worldcom, AT&T, Cisco, Intel, and so forth, had lost >50% of their value from where they stood when the NASDAQ peaked, I came to think that the market has found the bottom, and bought very heavily into large-cap tech stocks. Of course, the rest was history! My Worldcom and Global Crossings “investments†went to zero, Dell eventually broke even, and the rest are somewhere in between. I did sell most of my tech mutual funds, and took the capital gains tax hit. And speaking of taxes, losses will bring many “happy†years of $3000 annual capital gains write-offs.

 

“Buy, hold and diversify†should not be taken as a mantra. It is indeed far superior to many alternatives, but is by no means foolproof, and by no means necessarily the route to affluence, even over the proverbial long term. If there’s one thing that I learned, it’s that it is better to invest in index funds (several at once – S&P 500, overseas markets, etc.) than in actively-managed mutual funds. But even better than that, is getting the insider deal.