Wednesday, February 16, 2011

Investing and all that loverly stuff...



“Hello. This is your blog speaking. We haven’t talked in a while.” If my blog could speak, I’m sure that is what it would be saying. I DO have a valid excuse… well, sorta. #1, I have been really busy and when I’m not busy I have so much stuff to do that I’m behind in that I’m still busy. #2: Have you ever heard that song that goes “My life is kinda boring…” Well, my life is. Maybe not boring… but uneventful. I could write to you, but I don’t want to bore my somewhat small audience to death. So I have two things to tell you. First, I bought a farmer’s almanac the other day because I liked reading the canning recipes and the different interesting facts and I thought…”A lot of this stuff I know. So why not write about that?” So, from now on you will be seeing a lot of sustainable living sort of posts…. But not today. That brings me to #2. Something else I kinda fussed at myself about the other day. I was at work feeling guilty because I’d let my blog slip as of late (It was a reeaaally slow day at work and I had folded about 5,000,000,000 pairs of jeans and reset the planogram for half of those). If course, I was using excuse #2 from above, and after a few minutes I heard that inner-voice yelling at me (Does anyone else have a nicer and more quiet inner voice? I’m looking to trade mine in. She likes to talk a bit too much and she gets pretty irritating). Lessa-girl, you idiot. You are a business major and you have this investing thing that you’ve been doing and you don ‘t have anything to talk about? What a loser. And of course it went on and on….blah-de-blah-de-blah… till I told her that I would do my best to write about it so that she would shut up. And she did…about that particular issue –it’s really easy for her to find other issues to nag about. Anyway, moving on. Here I am writing to you about my financial investment. This might turn into a long one…but hang in there.

http://hybridpark23.blogspot.com/
Stocks are falling everywhere, treasury notes aren’t a very smart thing to invest in because, let’s face it, our treasury doesn’t have anything to treasure. Investing in CD’s and MMK’s actually costs you money because the interest rates fall below 1% and don’t even cover inflation. Dear old Uncle Sam keeps saying that things are looking up and they’ve said it so much that even the nay-sayers have began to believe him (I see a parallel here between Uncle and my little voice. Both of them like to nag. But can you imagine him as your voice? You’d never get anything done right.). The only thing that is looking up is inflation –The song that comes to mind here is Katy Perry’s “Fireworks.” The truth in simple terms? Things are not good. Things are not going to get gooder. Things are going to commit suicide off the empire state building –and it’s a long fall before things splatter on the pavement below. Of course, the only real and true way to prepare is to have faith in God that everything by His hand is good. And everything is by His hand, so this must be for our benefit in the long run. I don’t mean to sound like one of those loony hippy tree hugging global warmer end-of-days asteroid obliterating the earth type of people –cause I’m not, but we do need to be smart and take advantage of the temporary lull in our decent. We’ve pulled our parachute on the way down, yet if you look closely there are a few little pin-pricks in the fabric and they are going to get bigger. There are two ways (I’m a big fan of two, if you haven’t noticed) to help prepare us. #1: Self-sufficiency (see future blogs) and #2 investing your assets for future use.
Before I go any farther, let me say this: In ANY investing situation there are ways to lose out.                                                      If you are interested in taking ANY steps towards following my advice, please, please, please, please, do your own research. Even though I’m going to college for business, I am still not business savvy (What does anyone teach you about anything in college anyway?) I’m just common sense savvy. So…what is out there that you can invest in and make money at? I can answer you in one word: Currency! More specifically, the Iraqi currency. Currently, one U.S. dollar is worth 0.000855431993157 of an Iraqi dinar. Why is the dinar worth so little? It cannot be traded in the world market and, therefore, is pretty much useless. Note that this is the NEW Iraqi Dinars that were printed after Sadam was hung –they didn’t want to keep the old bills because his face was printed all over them. The new bills are some of the most secure ever printed and almost impossible to counterfeit –yet the world banking system has not waved their magic wand to make it useable in the world market. There are several reasons for this that I won’t go into for the sake of time. If you interested in more information however, I will be happy to supply, just let me know. As of right now, it looks like the magic wand will be waved and pretty soon too as Iraq is doing pretty good at the moment (a lot better than most media stations depict). Again there are several reasons why –but for the sake of length, I’m sticking to the very basics of basics. I might wind up writing another blog in the near future if enough readers are interested. This magic wand is called “re-evaluation” and, unless I’m just sadly missing a big puzzle piece somewhere, it will happen. The re-evaluation concerns all the big government people getting together and saying that one dinar will be worth so much money in comparison with other currencies (i.e. One of the popular speculations is that it will RV at 3.5 USD [RV = revalue and IQD = Iraqi Dinar] to 1 IQD). Even if it revalues at 1 CENT, you’ve made yourself a nice sum of money. Let me use myself as an example. I have 2.25 million Dinars. If the IQD RV’s at…say 2. That means 2.25 million IQD x 2 = 4.5 million USD. And here’s the thing: It’s going to basically act like stock, so it might RV at 2 but the whole demand-law will kick in and the value will temporarily rise beyond that amount. Sounds to good to be true, doesn’t it? Do some research and look at the fact in an objective manner. I have and, in my opinion, it’s not.
There is a down-side though. This is where the “fireworks” –aka: inflation—happens. I believe that the rising of the IQD will eventually be the downfall of the USD. I’d give it a year to be generous, but our dollar WILL fall.
So, here is my personal advice: Invest in the IQD (You can’t really lose out. If you don’t want it or need the cash back, just resell it.) and when/if the RV happens and you convert your IQD to USD, go one step farther and convert some of (or a lot of) your USD into hard assets such as precious metals and land.  Even if you don’t want to invest in the IQD, I suggest investing any saving into hard assets. I’m not trying to scare you or anything, but I have a feeling those who don’t will regret it in the future.  Basically, I’m saying use your money to make yourself and your family self sufficient.  On that note, I’ll leave you to your thoughts.
Questions, comments, concerns? Don’t be afraid to ask. I can at least refer you to someone who can answer them. The two IQD dealers that are the safest and most recommended are: DinarTrade and DinarBanking. They both have tons of info on their web pages and DinarBanking has some pretty good videos.

As always, my lovelies, thank you for your time in reading.
Leslie.