Since I was a kid I was told to save some money. However even though my dad was an economist, he never talked about investing and planning for retirement. He passed away a couple of years ago. I recently knew about tax except saving retirement accounts, like Individual Retirement Account (IRA) and Individual Saving Account (ISA) in other countries. However, I did not know anything about investing. So I took a free online course on financial planning.
Before that I thought of finance as boring, complicated and that it had that little to do with me. Now I realized how important finance literacy is and the role of finance in this society. I have saving accounts for work, I use a credit card for online shopping, I borrowed money for buying a car when I started growing grapes, and also had a no-interest loan to finance the drip irrigation system. Therefore I wanted to learn more and I started a course on Financial Markets from Yale University. The instructor is Robert Shiller, who was award the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 2013. The course is very interested and I wish I could talk to my dad about it. Now I talk my young children about finance and how important planning for retirement is.
One thing I learned is that investing is not about making money, it is about not losing money.
Very nice weather, clear days and some not so warm days. Sometimes windy days, chilly rain and stormy seas too. And even though the plum blossoms are appearing. Now I am pruning the late vineyards and not far from the green house there are plum trees and japanese orange trees.