As a Certified Financial Planner, I believe that everyone should know most of what I know. That is the entire purpose behind this free course.

I just wanted to thank you for signing up for this free course. It’s been a project that I’ve been thinking about for a long time, and I’m happy that it’s finally live.

Wealth represents a different amount of money for each of us, but that money represents the same central idea for us all: complete and total freedom.

Very simply, we invest because it puts our money in a position where it can work for us, instead of us having to continue to work for it. We invest, because investing can turn average inputs into extraordinary outcomes.

As Naval Ravikant said, “In 1,000 parallel universes, you want to be wealthy in 999 of them. You don’t want to be wealthy in the fifty of them where you got lucky, so we want to factor luck out of it.”

How we invest, can take different shapes and forms. But the most important thing, as we’ll see shortly, is that we put ourselves in a position to be able to invest for as long as possible.

Whenever you break anything down, whether it’s financial or not, you’re left with a bunch of simple components and ideas. If we’re able to strip things down to its simple features, it can make it a lot easier to understand.

Warren Buffett put himself in a position to be a great investor by starting early and prioritizing it throughout his life. But he became the greatest investor of all time because his investments were always in a position to work for him.

Our success comes down to doing the little things right, for a very long time. The issue is that what most people think matters, actually matters very little. And the thing that matters the most, is often overlooked.

I sincerely hope that you have come through this Chapter with a better understanding of how investing works, and more importantly, what actually matters when it comes down to building long-term success as an investor.

In order to be successful long-term investors, we want to disconnect our expectations from how we want the world to work, and instead, align our expectations with how the world actually works.

As investors, we want to have accurate timelines, as well as accurate contribution rates, and if our expected returns are way off, then we won’t get to where we want to go on time.

When we understand what has been completely normal, it can give us a better understanding of what could be completely normal moving forward. This can allow us to not be surprised, when those completely normal things do happen.

Bubbles happen for different reasons, during different periods of time, to different people, and in different places, but the behavioural patterns in every case are nearly identical.

We have experienced a recession about every 6 years, and they typically lasts for just less than a year. One of the biggest issues with recessions, is that we don’t know when one will start, or even once we’re in one, when it will finish.

When it comes to market predictions, there’s really only two things that we can be sure of: 1) that people will continue to make them, and 2) that they will continue to be wrong.

Instead of focusing on things that are outside of our control, a better way to measure our success is to look at the things that are within our control, and compare the effort that we’re putting in, to the effort required to meet our goals.

When we understand the normal aspects of being an investor, especially when it comes to risk, it can allow us to focus on what really matters, which helps us make better decisions, which ultimately leads to the success that we’re looking for as investors.

Without a defined goal, we lack the ability to measure our progress towards it, we have no way of knowing whether or not we are on track. And each of our financial futures are too important to leave up to chance.

As incredible as our brains are, the default settings of our brains are designed to respond to things that aren’t relevant to us anymore. It can be like trying to run modern software on outdated hardware.

When we’re overwhelmed by what we should do, inverting the problem can make a best decision clear and obvious. This can help us get moving in the right direction, ultimately bringing us closer to what matters most.

In order to bridge the gap between a complete stranger to a loved one, we need to think of our future selves as extensions of who we are today. The closer we feel to our future self, the better we’ll prepare for our future, whatever it brings.

If we can put our future self in an optimal position, it frees us up to spend our money more freely. It becomes less about what we spend our money on, and more about ensuring that what we spend our money on is important to us.

Research shows us that something as simple as thinking about what matters most, and who we most wish to become, can lead to a longer, healthier, more meaningful, and higher quality life.

A budget shouldn’t be something that is set up to fail. It shouldn’t prioritize only the present: it should prioritize the present and future, and it shouldn’t be exhausting: it should be so simple that we don’t even know we’re doing it.

In The Psychology of Money, author Morgan Housel wrote, “Planning is important, but the most important part of every plan is to plan on the plan not going according to plan.”

When we’re able to plan effectively, everything else seems to fall into place. We can focus on our plan, knowing that if we continue to do the right things, we will end up where we want to be.

When it comes to our long-term success as investors, it doesn’t really matter if every other aspect of what we’re doing is perfect, if our behaviour is working against us, it’s impossible to have the success we’re hoping for.

Investing is made up of a lot of simple concepts. Instead of believing that investing defies the rules that tie together the rest of our world, we have to understand that those individual concepts, operate in the same way that the rest of the world does.

We’re far from being the perfect investor, and that’s simply because we’re human. But we all have a remarkable gift: we can learn, adapt, and get better at the things we want to improve on. Luckily for us, we don’t have to be perfect.

To add another Morgan Housel quote, “Your personal experiences with money make up maybe 0.00000001% of what’s happened in the world, but maybe 80% of how you think the world works.”

My hope is that this illustrates two central ideas: that starting to invest sooner than later is extremely beneficial, and that starting to invest at any age has incredible potential.

If we can focus our attention to what really matters most to us, we can spend our money with intent, instead of regret. We want to align our behaviour and our everyday actions, with what matters most. Our core values and beliefs.

The best way that we can ensure our own success, is to understand what the challenges are, find solutions to those challenges, and act in a way that reinforces the positive behaviour that we need to be successful over the long-term.

Our success hinges on our ability to do the right things, for a very long period of time. In order to do that, we not only have to know what the right things to do are, but we have to have meaning and purpose behind why we want to do them.

We need to create distance between ourselves and our investments, so we’re not in a position of relying on them before we reach our goals. This requires us to create safeguards between us and our investments.

If everything had gone according to plan, the only thing that changes is the return on their statement. Meaningful change happens over decades, a return in any single year is going to have, very little impact in the grand scheme of things.

As investors, we can’t know what will move the needle the most in the future. So what we want to do, is put ourselves in the best position possible. One where, regardless of what happens, we’ll be in an optimal position.

No matter how much we believe in a company, we never want to be solely dependent on it, because we don’t know what can happen in the future. Sears and Blackberry, were at one point, the Apple and Amazon of their day.

Spending less than we make, establishing an appropriate emergency fund, and having proper insurance in place to cover the things we can’t easily replace, can all ensure that we leave our investments alone, allowing them to work for us.

When we don’t know what matters most to us, or what would make us happiest, it’s easy to believe that just about anything could be the answer. This can lead us down a path of wasteful spending, and ultimately regret.

Risk management is much more about giving our future selves options, than it is about being right. It’s much more productive to acknowledge what could happen, and prepare for it, than it is to simply hope for the best.

The catch is that in order to use them to their fullest advantage, we have to clearly understand how they work, and what their main advantages are. And unfortunately, this is where a lot of confusion begins for Canadians.

Over a lifetime, choosing the right account, and optimizing that account, can easily result in a difference of hundreds of thousands of dollars for a typical Canadian, over choosing the wrong or unoptimized account.

It all starts with having a better understanding of how everything works, so we can make better decisions moving forward, not by beating ourselves up about what we wish we would have done differently in the past.

By understanding how these types of pensions work, we can have a better idea of what to expect, and how to make the most of them. We can also more clearly understand why we’d still want to save and invest, even if we have a pension plan.

There’s a lot of variety, with literally thousands of options for bonds, stocks, mutual funds and ETFs. So it’s important to choose the option that most fits with what you know and understand, and make sure that the option is optimized.

You want to be the type of person that you would feel comfortable lending money to, with the confidence that you would be able to pay yourself back in full and on time. If you’re able to honestly say that, then you’re on the right track.

By understanding the opportunities that we have available to us, we can optimize our situation that much further. Investing has so much potential on its own, and if we’re able to use the best account for our goals, it can allow us to squeeze a little more out of that potential.

In this final chapter, we’re going to focus on combining everything that we’ve talked about in this course, into things that we can start taking action on today to improve our financial situation.

We invest because it puts our money in a position to work for us, instead of us having to continue to work for it. This is important because in order to build wealth, our money not only has to keep up with inflation, it has to grow at a rate above it.

Instead of focusing on material things, if we can envision a lifestyle that provides us with all of the happiness and fulfillment that we need, it gives us a much clearer sense of what really matters, and how we should ideally spend our time.

By starting with values, we can identify goals that are aligned with those values. During our day to day, we can reflect on our values when allocating our time and money. This can help ensure that our default is aligned with what matters most.

Our ability to initially contribute, and continue to contribute, to our investments, really depends on two simple requirements: our ability to spend less than we make, and our ability to maintain a positive net worth.

The goal here is to get a really good idea of where you are today, and ensure that it reflects your current situation, and your expected future situation. We have to understand our financial situation in order to improve it.

With investing, we want to make our goals known, we want to work towards what we want most, we want to make it as easy as possible, and know that if we do the right things, we’ll arrive at our dream destination.

We’ve arrived at the final video of this course. If you’ve made it this far, I really appreciate you following along, and I genuinely hope that you learned something along the way and found significant value.