Invest in fun s***, and tap dance on hard-work’s face.

Here is a secret: If you are having fun, you never have to work hard. Or, to put it another way, if you are having fun, working hard is not an ordeal — it can even be a rewarding, enjoyable way to spend your time.

This goes for:

• Work, work: Work for yourself; work at Pixar; work doing what you love …
• Exercise: Tramplines, sports (basket ball, soccer), paint ball, rock climbing .. .
• Other boring, annoying, scary, tiresome, awful, painful and/or smelly stuff: E.g., Raising children.

Examples of hard work being fun:

• Sex (although, I bet you had already figured this one out)
• Showering (stop and think about how much work you do in there! I bet you never noticed, as it feels so nice).
• Games/puzzles …
• Misc. (i.e., punching a pillow, chewing gum or running from small woodland animals while drinking Boons Strawberry Hill with your friends in the woods).

One of the secrets in this life is to learn basic life-hacks, such as the example above, and creatively, (and actively) apply them to other areas of your life. So how do we apply this “fun can distract from annoying/tiring/painful work” theory to investments?

Here is a list of five things you can do to make investing fun:

1)  Invest with friends: Get a group of people together, pool your money, and buy lots of stocks. Advantages of this route include: diverse knowledge and fresh leads; lowered fees, due to buying in bulk, and splitting the costs; more brains working on the problem; rapid diversification; it can be an excuse to get together and have fun!

2) Invest with your kids: Have your kids help you invest, and teach them a valuable skill at the same time.

3) Play “fantasy investing” (i.e., paper trading or paper investing). Get a bunch of fantasy football addicts, ante up, and win a pot of money at the end of a set period — then use your research to invest for real …(also, all of your competitors are giving you their research for free! Suckers!). My infomercial: Stop wasting your time on Baseball, Basket Ball, Football, Soccer, or Hockey, which only take your money! Play a game that can make you REAL money! Just send me three easy payments of $19.95! Act now! Supplies are limited to the first 6 billion! 

4) Buy companies you love: Guitars, watches, motorcycles, helicopters,  Hollywood, cosmetics, fashion, theater, whatever turns you on! My wife watches Charlie Hunnam on Sons of Anarchy, and begged me to buy Harley (HOG). I love music, so I bought a stock of a company I had heard of, Avid (NYSE: AVID), which makes Protools, a software used by every professional musician in the world. There is also Porsche (OTN: POAHF), Virgin Media (NASDAQ: VMED) and TakeTwo Interactive Inc. (TTWO) which owns RockStar & 2K Games, two well known video game companies. Your imagination is your limit, from Barbie (MAT) to Dungeons & Dragons (HAS) to Phineas & Ferb (DIS) to parachutes to Mythbusters (Discovery Communications, NASDAQ: DISCA) to L’Oreal (NASDAQ: LRLCY).

5) Buy companies you hate (and get your money back!): Microsoft is a dirty thief. I am determined to get my money back (see article related to this: here).

ROTH-IRA vs. Godzilla! (Quick Tip)

If you are going to get into investing, the very first thing you should do is look into an IRA (look at the pros/cons of ROTH vs. traditional here).

Any online investment house can host your IRA, for free (well,  the account is free).

Why an IRA? Because it forces you to not spend what you save (or, at least gives you serious pause), while also giving you a tremendous tax advantage (while the money is within the IRA):

i.e., If you cue up all your big-gun dividend yielding stocks, and put them into your IRA, you don’t pay taxes on the dividends (whether or not you re-invest them: why this is important) … then you can buy non-dividend stocks* for your non-IRA investments and not pay taxes until you sell them [at which point you should have very little “income”, a.k.a., you’re retired, and won’t get taxed like a brain surgeon].

As one professional said, “Put your tax-adverse investments within your IRA, and put your tax-advantaged investments (e.g., US government bonds) outside of your IRA.”

Hustle! The faster you get your IRA up, the more you can contribute! Time is the main variable at work here!

*Keep this in mind and be careful — in general companies that pay dividends do so because they are not reinvesting their money, whereas a company that is growing fast is probably not paying dividends (or, very little).

NOTE: StockGuilt is a blog about interesting stocks, and our views. We are not stock brokers, investment councilors, planners or legal advisers. In fact, at least one of us is an idiot. The rest are just folks who think about investments. This is what we think, and what we will do/did. In no way are we telling your what to buy or sell … Do your own homework.

If it works out for you, and you feel generous, well, we’ll probably get in trouble if we take your money, so …  We like Ronald McDonald house, Unicef, Salvation Army and SafeNest. 

Best return for your investment money, bar none. (Quick Tip)

What if I could get you 23% more money, per year, tax free? You’d be interested, wouldn’t you!

But here’s the thing, it’s not glamorous. Its not fun, or cool or even particularly satisfying … but, if you just simply look at it from a accountants point of view, you’ll see, it’s the best investment you can make:

Paying off your credit card bills.

I don’t know about you, but my rates are about 13.3-27%, per year! If I had $1000 to invest, and $5000 dollars in debt, mathematically, it would make more sense to pay off $1000 on my bills: I could only expect $75-150 in earnings on a stock, whereas I would be paying $130-270 per year, per thousand I owed on credit cards.  

And this type of investment has other benifets: It strengthens your credit (which is good for loans on houses, real estate investments and business loans) and it requires you to make a concerted effort to pay-down debt, while making no additional purchases. You will also learn that there is more than one way to make money, and that looking at a balance sheet is just as important, if not more important, than reading investment news.

If you are serious about your financial future, this is a critical first step.

NOTE: StockGuilt is a blog about interesting stocks, and our views. We are not stock brokers, investment councilors, planners or legal advisers. In fact, at least one of us is an idiot. The rest are just folks who think about investments. This is what we think, and what we will do/did. In no way are we telling your what to buy or sell … Do your own homework.

If it works out for you, and you feel generous, well, we’ll probably get in trouble if we take your money, so …  We like Ronald McDonald house, Unicef, Salvation Army and SafeNest.