Bryan C. Fleming

Dereck and I had been emailing back and forth.  I asked him if he’d like to be guest blogger on my blog.  He accepted.  Now I think anyone who reads this would agree that Dereck put a lot of work into writing this article.  Please take a moment and stop by his blog http://thebeststocktradingintheworld.blogspot.com/.  I’m subscribed to his RSS Feed and I can tell you he consistently puts out great stuff.  Here’s Dereck:

 Any readers of this who have happened to have visited my own blog would know that it is a ruse, of sorts. While at the same time being about the stock market it is also about thinking. It is the thinking man’s portal to the world of investment. By coming from that perspective, it was an immense pleasure to have come across The Home of the Million Dollar Savings Club. “Thinking”, as it has seemed to me, instead of being some mysterious art practiced by ancient men in robes and sandals busy staring out into the abyss we call the Mediterranean, is a tool practiced by men and women willing to resist their natural impulses. “To stop and think” suddenly becomes literal.

What more perfect a place is there then to make an observation such as this than on Bryan C. Fleming’s website?–a  place where we can all stop and think, and when we do, resist one of our greatest natural impulses: the impulse to spend.

When I was a boy, and I had done something stupid, my father used to make me do pushups. Not as a course of punishment, but as a means to teach me the thing he said to me whenever I found my nose facing the floor, arms outstretched: “If you’re going to be stupid, you’re going to be strong.” Now at some point in our lives, we lose watchful parents but instead of gaining some kind of benevolent substitute, what we find is more pushups. Like when we’re broke, or scraping by, or looking at a great distance toward our hopes and dreams while pretending that they are much closer than they are. We may even feel the same sweat on our brows, or the same pain in our arms.

But now this time we are the ones who have to do the teaching. We are the ones who have to stop and think. We have to decide to do differently what it was that got us here again, all fingers in sand. Like starting to save a dollar a day.

Worry not my friends, life need not be so austere either! We can still, as some parents do, look down at ourselves and laugh, with the full knowledge that the end is not so distant after all—it is only as far as a single decision to straighten up, learn from our mistakes, and save a buck or two. Or even a million.

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Relax with friends after work with a novelty tie turn up the fun.