Dear friends!

I’ve just written my first book, “ Panzer’s Guide to Financial Freedom: It’s Your Money and It’s Your Life ” and will be offering it free for distribution. You can email me at rod.loh at gmail.com for your complimentary copy.

View the animated video clip to find out what Panda learnt when he met Panzer.

Here’s an excerpt from the book:

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1.3.2. Saving = don’t keep up with Lims, Muthus and Alis

Many of the stuff we find in our homes are basically trophies in the quest for us to go one-up against our neighbours. Your neighbour has a 29” Sharp Aquos, you get a 32” Sony Bravia. Your wife’s colleague gets a Coach handbag from her husband, your wife nags you to get a Prada for her birthday. Your cousin’s son goes to Pat’s schoolhouse for pre-school lessons, you feel compelled to part with thousands of dollars a month to send your darling daughter to Eaton House.

Where does all this keeping up appearances end up? In the path away from financial freedom. Looking good but ending up in negative net worth territory is not the way towards being financially free.

1.3.3. Investing is not about Oil-Pods and Sunshine Empire

We have heard the saying, “A fool and his gold are soon parted.” Guess what? We are all fools, but differ in the degree of being foolish. My apologies if you felt insulted by what I just wrote. What I’m saying here is that investment is a risky business. It is about knowing our own foolish tendencies to believe investments that are “too good to be true” because greed and fear that override our commonsense.

When investing, we all want something safe that is capital protected and yet earns us unlimited upside returns. Capital protection and yet 10-20% returns.

“Wait long long…” is another phrase you’ll hear if you are seeking such quick gains and profits. You risk falling for scams such as Oil-Pods or Sunshine Empire type of “investment” schemes.

Make no mistake. Investing is risky. You can potentially lose 100% of your investments if you do not understand what you are investing. Recent investors who staring at potential losses of all their monies and in some cases life savings of $250,000 put in their monies into Lehman Minibonds, High Notes, Pinnacle notes and the like not knowing that such structured products are very risky and not capital protected at all.

Success in investing doesn’t correlate with I.Q. once you’re above the level of 25. Once you have ordinary intelligence, what you need is the temperament to control the urges that get other people into trouble in investing.

- Warren Buffet

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Be well and prosper!

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