A Dog Would Eat All Day Long . . . If It Could . . . It’s A Good Lesson.

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The top 1% represents about 1.3 million households who roughly make more than $500,000 a year — out of a total of almost 130 million. Bloomberg News.

January, 2021, right before I started writing for Making of a Millionaire, I decided that I had to eat my own dog food.

Let’s back up a little and explain that. Eating your own dog food refers to following your own advice, buying your own product or using your own service. The founders of almost every new company should follow this path. The learning that arises from being a customer is just too valuable to ignore.

So, at ThinkingLonger, we took our 2021 stock recommendations and invested $25,000 using an IRA account (to avoid taxes) and did not pay our broker’s fees from the account (to at least emulate our recommendation to avoid brokerage fees).

Remember, we don’t trade. Our method is to buy at the beginning of the year and sell at the end of the year. We don’t try to time the market and we don’t use stop losses to control our losses. Our strategy is to buy an equal dollar amount of stocks with a ten year history of spectacular price performance and hold them for a year. During the year, we do NOTHING but sit and wait. We don’t care about the news, market movements, elections, Federal Reserve decisions, mergers or anything else that may occur doing the year. At the end of the year, we sell those stocks that don’t meet our ownership criteria and buy new stocks. We give our (free) subscribers our annual recommendations when they sign up and new recommendations at the end of that year and the beginning of the next one. It’s not very complicated.

For most of us at MOAM, we do not have the time, energy or skills to be stock analysts or stock traders. Sure, we can buy some crypto or pick up a few shares of GameBoy and take a chance. But, absent endless hours of hard work or the luck of the Irish, that doesn’t sound like a plan for financial independence. Moreover, we already have a day job and one or more side hustles.

With all that going on, and before we start investing in stocks, we should ask ourselves one question: why invest in individual stocks at all if there is not a reasonable expectation of doing better than the annual…