I started investing a fixed percentage of my salary every month in 2002 in Sun Life Prosperity Funds (mutual funds) and I have been doing it until now. And as my salary increased over the years, I have also adjusted the monthly amount I set aside for investing. It has become such a habit that I don’t even miss that portion of my salary anymore. It just automatically gets deducted form my salary and it gets invested automatically in my investment. This discipline has helped me in several ways:
1. It helps me budget and spend within my means. This means, that I only spend what’s left of my salary AFTER I have set aside the amount for investment
2. It has allowed me to accumulate quite a sizable fund for future purposes (without even noticing it). It just grew through the years.
3. This practice has kind of insulated me from the economic crisis because investing regularly instead of one time, lumpsum, helped average out my cost of investment so that when the market went down, I was still up.
Just wanted to share this because I have really found that it has helped me a lot. All it took was a decision and the discipline to carry it out. The important thing is you start with an amount you are comfortable with so you can easily live up to the commitment of doing it monthly. Before you know it, you would have accumulated a fund you can be proud of.
