It has been almost 2 years since my first Positive Energy blog, and boy, what a great 2 years it has been. The day after I sent out Positive Energy on March 10 2009, the stock market rallied:
Dow... 6,926.49 +379.44 (+5.80%)Nasdaq... 1,358.28 +89.64 (+7.07%)S&P 500... 719.60 +43.07 (+6.37%)Gold future... 895.90 -22.10 (-2.41%)30-Year Bond 3.71% +0.11 (+3.17%)10-Yr Bond... 2.98% +0.10 (+3.33%)
I had been laid off of my job in October 2008. I received a nice little severence package and decided to invest a good portion of it into the plunging stock market. Since that time, my investments are up over 76% . Mr Buffet says the best time to invest is when everyone else is scared. Now that's pretty positive thinking and it has obviously worked for him. I certainly do not have his millions to invest but my tiny little investment experiment has done pretty well, without a broker or any professional advice I sat down down and thought about what people might be continuing to invest in with the economy as it was, and those are the stocks I bought.
My mother began selling Avon to make extra money so I figured lots of people who are out of work might be doing the same thing... so I bought Avon. Avon is up 61% since then. I also belived the banks would pull through so I invested in Wells Fargo which is now up 165% since that day.
Losing my job was a real blow. I'm no spring chicken so I have no illusions about the difficulty of competeing with kids half my age in the job market. I thought about my prospects, my monthly expenses, and looked at the worst case scenario which is the eventual inability to make my house payment and /or even live in the expensive San Francisco bay area. I noticed that there were still good jobs being advertised in my industry in areas where living is cheaper and the weather much warmer so I decided I would rent out my home and take this time to research opportunities and living conditions in the desert communities while staying with friends and saving resources. By January I had a terrific job offer back in Northern California. The bad news is, my home was still rented for 3 more months yet with synchronicity fully in play I found a furnished apartment that was being subleased by friends and in a perfect location. While living in that small apartment I realized how much simpler life could be and I thoroughly embraced the experience. Having a landlord to fix things, a much smaller place to clean, and the convenience of having a gym, restaurant and social life all right there my boyfriend and I both agreed that we could easily scale way down and be just fine regardless of what life might throw at us. There wasn't a single day that we weren't delighted with the experices we were having. Now that I mention my boyfriend I might also mention that after 7 years of dating we were finally married last year. I attribute that decision to the lessons we both learned by refusing to let the loss of a job and dire economic news to stop me in my tracks. Looking at the worst case scenario and making a plan for getting through are essential, but the the divine luck of having friends and opportunities present themselves can only be attributed to good old positive energy.
