A wise man leaves an inheritance to his children's children (Proverbs 13:22)
Someday, you will likely be too old to work. Yet you will still need food, clothing, and shelter. Should you bury your head in the sand and pretend the future problem goes away? That would be foolish. There are a handful of verses in the Bible about planning ahead and saving. Consider:
The wise store up choice food and olive oil, but fools gulp theirs down. (Proverbs 21:20)
The plans of the diligent lead to profit as surely as haste leads to poverty. (Proverbs 21:5)
Go to the ant, you sluggard; consider its ways and be wise! It has no commander, no overseer or ruler, yet it stores its provisions in summer and gathers its food at harvest. (Proverbs 6:6-8)
Four things on earth are small, yet they are extremely wise: Ants are creatures of little strength, yet they store up their food in the summer; (Proverbs 30:24-25)
It is good, proper, and wise to plan ahead, not just to prepare for yourself in your old age, but, as the Proverbs 13 verse for which this blog is named says, to have something to leave to your children and grandchildren.
To that end, this blog will focus on investing in the future in a matter that is not at odds with the Kingdom of God. Though, as shown above, there are verses condoning prudent planning, the paucity of such verses -- and zero actual commands -- make clear that, as would be expected, God assigns very little weight to this. God cares far more about the condition of your soul than your bank account. Nevertheless, your bank account is of some use, both to plan for your own needs as well as your family's.
The P13 Portfolio is a quasi-hypothetical portfolio. All its holdings are real, but the quantities are not. There are two reasons why: My actual, real portfolio already has investments that I purchased prior to starting this blog; when I add new investments I add a lower percentage than what I would if I was starting with an all-cash portfolio. Not only that, but in my real portfolio I add more cash regularly; the P13 Portfolio will start with all cash with no more ever added to it; thus it will easy to compute annual return on investment.
The second reason is, again, related to those previously mentioned old holdings. Those investments are pointless to you; you have no way of making those purchases in the past when I did, and any gains they've seen are also irrelevant. After all, any charlatan can find some stock that has gone up 1000% and then claim to have called it ahead of time, but you have no way of knowing whether or not they really did. While my past investments are relevant to me, they are of no value to you. Nevertheless, the only time trades will be entered into the P13 Portfolio will be after actual real trades have been filled at actual real prices; only the quantities will be hypothetical.
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