Mighty Bargain Hunter

Better best beach beast investing

December 1st, 2007 | by mbhunter |

One book my daughter chooses for me to read to her is Dr. Seuss’s Oh Say Can You Say? which is filled with all sorts of terrible tongue-twisters. It’s fun to read, but being the occasional picky grammarian, I took issue with one of the features:

Upon an island hard to reach,
the East Beast sits upon his beach.
Upon the west beach sits the West Beast.
Each beach beast thinks he’s the best beast.

Which beast is best? . . . Well, I thought at first
that the East was best and the West was worst.
Then I looked again from the west to the east
and I liked the beast on the east beach least.

I’ve read that a couple of dozen times or so, and I thought, “Wait a second. There are only two beach beasts. How can one beach beast be the best? Shouldn’t one be better than the other?” As in:

Upon an island hard to reach,
the East Beast site upon his beach.
Upon the west beach sits the West Beast.
Each beach beast thinks he’s the better beast.

Which beast is better? . . . Well, I thought at first
that the East was better and the West was worse.
Then I looked again from the west to the east
and I liked the beast on the east beach less.

Which, although not nearly as much fun to say, is more gramatically correct.

But was the first way actually wrong? Dr. Seuss got into my head and said:

M B of H, you’re a silly old goose!
Your head-screw is getting a little bit loose.
That was right what I wrote, and now that I’ve writ it
I’ll take a brief moment and help you to get it.

The East Beast, the one on the east beach right there
Is one of the beach beasts of which you’re aware.
The West Beast, the one turned the other way ’round
Is another beach beast at the least you have found.

But the Northeast Beach Beast is off of your scope
And the Southwest Beach Beast is still there, one would hope.
You saw just two! There are others, you see.
If that’s all that there was, I sure would agree
That to say best, worst, and least you need three.

But just because YOU can’t see all of the beaches
With all of the beach beasts at outermost reaches
Doesn’t mean that they’re gone! They all still must count.
And once that you’ve tallied the proper amount
You’ll see I was right when I least-ed and best-ed
For four beastly beach beasts had squatted and rested.

Well, there you go.

So what does this have to do with investing?

I hear a lot about the trade-off between stocks and bonds, and that in good times one wants to be invested in stocks, and in bad times one wants to buy bonds. It isn’t always the case that you’ll be presented with either-or like this, but I have heard it before. Or you might throw cash in the mix to get out of both stocks and bonds.

Even this, though, is only three options. There are many different investment vehicles out there, including ones you might not see. Many different ways to make money that you might not know about. I attended a real estate class and was amazed at all of the different ways that these guys were making money with real estate. I knew you could fix up and sell and buy and rent, but there were all kinds of other things, like options, rent to own, short sales, etc.

The main point is that there are likely investment vehicles that are good that you don’t know about, and the best one might be off your radar. Look around and find it!

Questions tagged credit-card at Cash Commons:

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