Todd Tresidder – Learn From Your Mistakes, Don’t Feel Bad About Them

Todd Tresidder is the author of seven personal finance books with an eighth coming out shortly. He created a course on strategic wealth planning and is the founder of FinancialMentor.com, a popular personal finance site. He is a self-made millionaire and was financially independent at age 35, which was more than two decades ago. Since then he’s been coaching clients on how to do the same giving him an unusual depth of experience. Todd has maintained his wealth by remaining an active investor and utilizing statistical and mathematical risk-management systems for investing. Through FinancialMentor.com he teaches advanced investing and advanced retirement planning principles. Take the next step beyond conventional financial advice and discover what works, what doesn’t, and why, based on years of proven experience.   “So he had all kinds of great stories about how this company was going to the moon and he didn’t understand the setback but this company was going to fly and I was a stupid kid and I bought it hook line and sinker and I put even more money into it. So I made this stupid mistake of averaging down on a loss you know chasing good money after bad and eventually went to zero, and I lost everything.” Todd Tresidder     Support our sponsor   Today’s episode is sponsored by the Women Building Wealth membership group, the complete proven step-by-step course to guide women from novice to competent investor. To learn more, visit: WomenBuildingWealth.net.       Worst investment ever Graduate joins HP, friend in credit department offers hot stock tip Todd made his first and worst investment when he fresh out of college. Holding a fine résumé for a new graduate, he had been the business manager for campus businesses. It was the mid-1990s and he had read the book In Search of Excellence, by Tom Peters. He went straight from college to work for HP, one of the top companies employers at the time, and had a friend in the credit department. One day during a lunch-time chat, his friend told him about a new company they were working with that was buying HP mainframes, and they were listed in the pink sheets on the Nasdaq. Todd’s friend had put his money in the company’s stock after doing financial analysis on the company and all this. ‘Inside scoop’ meant he put in all funds he had saved for his MBA course So Todd felt this was a “cool insider scoop” on this “amazing emerging company”. The company had an algorithm that was dominating how mail was going to be sent. Todd said “it sounds so absurd now, but it sounded cool at the time”. He had been busily saving for tuition fees to study for an MBA after paying his own way through school, and was still trying to pay off his college costs. He was also saving some money but chose instead to stick his savings into the pink sheet stock. Initially, it went up....