10 Reasons of Not Yet Having USD1m

[Translated from Cho Yan Chiu (曹仁超)'s 投資者日記 at HKEJ on March 24, 2007]

The reasons of why you are not yet a client of private banking (i.e. having current asset of USD1m or above worth) are:

1. You spent too much money in pursuit of materialistic lifestyle and you have not been concentrating on accumulating your wealth, including spending too much money on fashion, cosmetics, leisure travelling and purchasing luxury items;

2. You do not have budget to your spending, for instance, you always borrow money from credit card for consumption and pay expensive interest from credit cards, and not to consume when you have enough money;

3. You have bad habits, including smoking, pubbing, football gambling, horse gambling and going to casinos. Being you have a large sum of wealth, you spent your seed money;

4. You do not have targets, especially financial targets. You would rather play online games rather than learning wealth management;

5. You do not prepare psychologically. For example, in the 60s I (Lo Cho) had 3 jobs because I didn't have sufficient capital (in addition to the job at securities firm, I earned money from newspapers by writing articles about my investment experyience and tutoring school children). My first 10,000 capital was obtained by these means;

6. You like short-term trading too much. For example, you use 10,000 to earn 3,000, use 100,000 to earn 10,000, and disallow the profit runs. So what you earned is 'little', but sometimes mistakenly lost the 'big' money;

7. Don't think that others could manage wealth for you. You could get advice from many others but the decision should be made on your own. Others would not make decision on your money (investment) because you are the one to bear the reward and loss. When you lose, others won't compensate you. When you earn, you won't share 50% of it with others;

8. You invest in something you do not know, like the Vietname stock market. I (Lo Cho) was positive about it last year but I didn't invest in it because I do not know about it;

9. You are afraid of losting money, and do not understand 'stop losing; don't stop earning'. As long as you have prepared psychologically to lose 15% of your capital in the market, you could feel comfortable to invest. However, too many people would rather put money into banks and are willing to allow the depreciation of money by inflation but not involve in investing. As you are afraid of losing money, you do not understand 'big money won't come in if small money is not given out';

10. You utterly do not have interest in owing asset of USD1m or above. Few people are not interested in earning money and once they have money they would like to spend them right away, and do not have interest in learning earning money from money. They'd rather go shopping, watching movies, dining, going to karaoke, and even thinking that reading HKEJ is a difficult task, so how could these people earn USD1m or above? If you don't keep an eye on your money, how it could grow?

Seems that my translation sucks - and I really find those who does translations as career is really someone great... hahaha