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It’s been a rough week behind the scenes at Get Rich Slowly. My hosting company experienced unexpected trouble, which meant that this site was only intermittently accessible for the past three days. Meanwhile, I’ve been busy and had little time to write. Here are a couple of interesting articles that came across my desk recently:

Your Money or Your Life: Step Nine Revisited
Last Friday, I mentioned the Crossover Point, that point in time at which your investment income exceeds your monthly expenses. I learned about this concept from Your Money or Your Life. In the comments to that post, we discussed that the book’s admonition to buy bonds (and only bonds) seems outdated. Kristi pointed out that Vicki Robin, one of the books authors, posted an update to the book’s investment advice. Low-risk, socially responsible mutual funds are now considered a keen alternative.

A Conversation with Benjamin Graham
Here’s a 1976 interview with Benjamin Graham, perhaps Warren Buffet’s most important mentor. Graham discusses the difficulty of investing to beat the stock market, and offers two suggestions for individual investors to find valuable stocks. Among his advice:

  • The individual investor should act as an investor, not as a speculator.
  • The investor should have a pre-defined selling policy when purchasing individual stocks.
  • The investor should split his portfolio between stocks and bonds, always holding at least 25% of each.

Index funds are the best choice for most individual investors, but if you want to purchase individual stocks, you could do worse than to take the advice of Benjamin Graham.