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.

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.

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.

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.

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.