Pack Your Own Parachute

Hi Everyone,

No, I am not going sky diving (even though I have always wanted to, but I have not gotten enough courage yet to do it).

'Pack your own parachute', was a term used by a consulting colleague of mine. It basically means, make sure, you have everything in place to make things happen!!

One of my resolutions this year, was to have made 20k profit in my investments (I have no shares at the moment, so this is a bold statement), through building a strong and profitable investment portfolio. This might sound grand, but all I mean, is that I wanted to buy some cheap shares in a few stable companies and then over the next 5 -10 years, watch them grow.

My best friend Brenda and I decided a few years ago to invest in ourselves and we hired a investment mentor, to teach us how to find good shares and make money in the stock market.

Since we took the mentoring class, I have to say honestly, we have not really used the skills we acquired!! Why do people do that? Spend money to learn something and then do nothing with it?
I know for me, one of the reasons, I did not put my new skills into practise, was because I thought I was not good enough at it and I thought I might fail.

A dear friend of mine Cyndi said to me, 'If you are not trading, then you have already failed' That woke me up!!!

So, back to my resolution for this year

• 20k profit from my investments.
• The habit I had to stop, was to STOP stalling
• One of the new habits was to build a watch list of companies, I would like to invest. ( This will allow me to notice whether the shares prices are rising and falling and help me to see, when would be the best time buy).

So that's what I did. I built my watch list (using information from the news, or http://www.fool.com/, they send me daily information on the market and the economy, banking info etc and it is really jargon free).

Anyway, I have been watching shares in a company called Xstrata. Brenda and I had bought shares in this company about 2 years ago for 21 GBP and sold then for about 36 GBP!!! Well with the economy the way it is right now, the shares were down to about 7GBP.

So, I put my skills into practice and worked out that once the shares fell below 6 GBP, I would buy them.

Then guess what, yesterday, the shares were at about 5.50 GBP. I was so excited. The company was issuing cheap shares to raise capital.I was going to BUY!!! I was READY!!!

So, I excitedly went into Brenda and my share on line account to buy the shares. I had the password and log on. YEAH, I was in. But then they wanted the secret word!!!! No! No!. I did not know it!! Brenda had set up the account!!! So why couldn't I call Brenda I hear you ask?!!

BECAUSE she is on holiday and I did not have a number for her!!!! I did not pack my own parachute!!! I always relied on Brenda to make the transactions!!! So I watched the share price rise yesterday and could not get in the game!!! Something just came to me!! I did not even think of a different way to buy the shares!!! If I had thought of a solution, rather than just starred at the problem, I might have those shares now at the 5ish GBP price!!!

So, when getting ready to do anything, make sure that you have thought everything through, so you can seize the opportunity when it comes, rather than have to sit on the plane and watch everyone else jumping out and having an amazing time!!

See you tomorrow.

Gina