SHOULD YOU WAIT TO INVEST??

Should you wait to invest? Hypothetically, if there's a short term dip now due to the government shutdown, should you run in and load up and buy a whole bunch of investments, or should you wait for the inevitable stock market crash that is eventually going to happen? This is one of those impossible to answer questions because when is the crash coming? I mean, there will be a recession at some point. Will it be tomorrow? Will it be in three months? Will it be next year? Will we manage to avoid it altogether for five years? And then what happens? Markets go up and up and up and you just sit on the sidelines waiting, waiting, waiting, missing out on all that growth. Or what if you invest and then the markets do go down? Oh, you're going to feel like an idiot. The thing you have to remember as an investor is that your objective is the long term, 10, 20, 30 years from now, not tomorrow or next year. You could buy a stock today at 80 bucks and it goes to 60 in a month and there's a recession and the reason the stock is going down is just because of the recession. You know, okay, then you maybe buy a little bit more if it's a quality company. That's when real wealth is created, by the way. This is my 2008 recession investing wish list. You should all have one because they are wealth generators. But if you sit on the sidelines waiting, then you miss out on compounding and acquiring more and more shares, potentially every single month if you're the type who dollar cost averages. The idea that like you're going to sit and wait for like the perfect moment to enter is a loser's game, cause no one can do it correctly. And the people who do do it correctly, they just got lucky. They just go, I can't believe I bought it at the bottom. They didn't know like today is the bottom, I will buy here. Nobody knows. Here's what I do. My whole approach to investing is long term focused. I'll buy, if I want something today, I'll buy it. I don't, I don't care. Oh well, what if this happens and it doesn't matter to me. I'm focusing on 30 years, not three weeks. So I really don't care. So what I do is a hybrid approach of lump sum and averaging in. So what I do is I say I want 1,000 shares in a company. I'll buy 500 today and then with the remaining capital that I have, I'll add in on really particularly bad down days in the market. Just pay attention. Oh, markets are down one and a half percent today. Oh, let me check my stock. Oh wow, look, it's down 8% today. All right, I'll buy another 50 shares here. That way I have the majority of my investment taken care of and then I average in taking advantage of down days. This is just what I do. Some people just hold, you know, 20% in cash in their accounts at all times so they can take advantage of days like this. Other people don't. They just lump sum invest. The earliest with the most and then they just forget about it and they let dividends handle the rest, you know, in terms of compounding if the stock pays a dividend. Your goal is to be consistent no matter what. By the way, new policy, if you're not following and you leave a comment or you ask a question, I'm not going to respond to you. It's just the way I set boundaries and prevent people from taking advantage.