#4- Investing: In the Market, or in Ammo?

Alright, so some blended gun and money stuff. Generally shooters are going to grab for the box of ammo with our cash every, single, time. Collectors are going to put things in layaway. Meanwhile, our lame, non-shooty friends are spending their money on travel, food, housing, cars, or stacking those dollars in a bank account. Come on - I can’t load a magazine with french fries..........right?

Well, Houston, we’ve got a problem. Our brains are trying to pick one or the other, but it can’t pick both, nor can we find a shade of grey in a room full of nuns. Let’s try and address that first, because finding the greyscale in the world is the ticket forward in my opinion. Obviously, when we choose to buy ammo to shoot (and you know you shoot all of it) we don’t have money for investing. And, if we invest, we don’t have money to buy ammo.

I believe one way to address this is to create an ammo budget - for example, when I buy a two boxes of ammo, I limit myself to shooting one of them. It allows me to slowly build my reservoirs for a training class, makes it easier on my bank account, and it evens out the price fluctuations of the market. Granted, I work at a gun store part time so that helps a little bit, but that doesn’t help me buy ammo in the future.

Here’s a secret - set part of your monthly budget to go towards investing AND ammo. Don’t think budgets are for you, or are too hard? See blog post #2 (https://tinyurl.com/f2r5nvk6) and pay attention to the middle part where Sethi’s book is discussed (https://amzn.to/3nnJhco). Alright, so that takes care of working in this money - if we invest the money through a broker (I prefer TDAmeritrade) we can actually generate money in the future that we can draw on. There’s a couple ways to do this, and I’m a fan of generating monthly income by dividends and distributions.

What this allows us to do is flick a switch with our broker and have that income stream go to us as money, or as shares. Long term, this means that the free money we’ve made can go towards paying for bills - like the utilities, or the range membership, or buying ammo.

How effective is it? Like most permanent things, it started slowly, and then it started to gather steam. Right now, I’m basically getting a free box of ammo at retail price every month. At the current pace, I’ll be getting about two free boxes of ammo at retail price every month this time next year even inevitable price increases. And that will keep going, and going, and going - from that free money I mentioned before. The chart below is my net worth for 2021 (and I’m not quite debt free yet) - there's an obvious upward trend here. This is working, and once the habit is formed, it is much easier to follow.