Hi
@Foxdog
I could say “all of the above” because these are all things that could be in someone’s plan.
But where I will start is with the why bother to have a plan.
We all are hopefully learning everyday from our life experience and in my Police career I had drummed into me the importance of operational planning to deal with emergency situations.
The reasoning behind this is very simple it is harder to think and easier to make mistakes in situations of stress.
So the best time to think and make decisions is during periods of calm when you can stand back and in your own time weigh all your options.
This idea carried over into my work as a prosecutor and then as a lawyer.
As a lawyer I quickly realised that when clients came to me looking for a solution to whatever their problem was it was incredibly rare for the client to actually have thought through what the solution would look like and where they would go once it was achieved.
Risk reward was a foreign concept which never entered their thinking.
For example in a simple personal injury case the risk you might think is clear you could loose.
This however is often not the greatest risk for the client the greatest risk is winning but not being awarded sufficient having regard to what it cost to win and then receiving a conservative assessment of their loss by the court leaving them with insufficient to achieve their goal.
Thus it can often be the case that taking an early offer of settlement for what seems to be a modest amount can best satisfy their goal.
What I discovered however was that the majority of my clients were so stressed at and during settlement negotiations they could not think properly about the risk reward even when laid out in front of them in black and white at the time an offer was made and being discussed.
It was apparent that I needed to educate the client from the moment they walked into my office about the need to have a plan should an offer of settlement be made to them. It is mostly the case that settlement offers have a time limit on acceptance often as tight as until close of business on the day of offer.
I see this as entirely analogous to buying shares in the hope they will appreciate in value.
At any point an announcement like the Mercedes Benz reveal can come out of left field and things go crazy and you have a very limited amount of time to make decisions under severe stress.
Someone who had a plan as simple as I will sell all my holding when it hits $2.00 and pay off my mortgage early and I am happy to wait five years would have been greatly advantages by putting that plan into immediate effect.
The person without a plan would likely have missed the opportunity by the time they decided what to do the opportunity would have been lost.
In fact I am sure like me you have read posts by some here saying ‘I wish I had …. when the price hit $2.34.’
Plans do not need to be complicated or clever.
All they need to be is made before the event.
The clever part is having a plan and executing it.
Buying 50,000 shares for your child’s long term financial future is a plan. But how simple and uncomplicated is such a plan.
Having a target value that will net you an amount to pay off your mortgage 30 years ahead of schedule is a plan.
Again very simple but nonetheless paying off your mortgage is life changing for most people. I know it was for my wife and I.
My personal situation and plan is peculiar to me and has no application to anyone else so has no value.
I am strange in this regard and have lots of factors in play that definitely are peculiar to me.
Suffice to say my plan is to create generational wealth. The first part of my plan involves trading to average down to increase my overall share portfolio. The second part is to continuously control risk by researching and reading everything I can about the companies I hold. I am not a set and forget investor.
My opinion only DYOR
FF
AKIDA BALLISTA
www.engineering.com
bhoneyaustralia.com.au
(joke obviously)
