Stay On Your Own Mat

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Over the years I have posted a couple of tag lines or other little sayings related to the task of investing. Conceptually I don't think any of them are original but that doesn't make them any less useful. Barry Ritholtz found a short blog post at the NY Times that hit on a couple of these types of things I have been writing about over the years.

One of my tag lines has been stay on your own mat which is a yoga reference about not worrying about how the person next to you in the class does the poses. Ideally a yoga student is focusing on their breathing and trying to make progress at their own pace with the positions.

So it is with investing for both do it yourselfers and professionals. We all have our own skill sets, interest levels and only so much time available to spend on the task. You may know someone who routinely makes a killing on three and four legged option combos but that doesn't make the trades right for you. In this vein the linked article talked about Harvard Management Company buying a dairy farm in New Zealand.

Also related (and in the article too) is defining and sticking to your goals not someone else's. One example from the article was recent Standford MBA grad's who go 100% equities (not sure if this was a made up example) which might be right for a 25 year old making a lot of money right out of the chute but that is not going to be the right allocation for the typical 50 year old.

Another concept picked up in the article that is covered here regularly was "most of what we hear about investing isn’t right or wrong. It’s a matter of applying what we hear to our own situation"  which is of course a different way of saying take little bits of process from various places to create your own process.

There are others we've talked about here about not panicking, about adequate savings rates but really this all boils down to the need to learn about ourselves first and then devise the right financial plan (either by yourself or by hiring someone) for our particular situation taking into account all of our quirks.

Speaking of long running themes of this blog, one of them is one off expenses that cannot be budgeted for and for us this month that is tires on the other car (we needed tires for one vehicle a few months ago).