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It is truly a shame that there is no serious investment in the financial education of Brazilians. Brazil even has, at least in the urban areas of most cities, a good educational infrastructure in place. However, it is poorly equipped and poorly managed.
Financial education should be one of the first concerns after children become literate, but it is not.
Mathematics is taught that, in much of the content, is not and will not be part of most people's daily lives and the teaching of how to deal with money is completely ignored, a necessity present in everyone's daily lives, without exception.
And the worst thing is that, for some reason, most people believe that it is possible to accumulate wealth without effort. So, when they invest, they do it in the worst way, putting their hard-earned money in bad financial products and in most cases throwing their “sweat” in the trash when betting on such Bets.
But there are those who, even without knowledge, take risks on the Stock Exchange thinking that they just need to buy shares to do well. There are those who fear the stock market because they find it complex, feeding the belief that volatility causes more losses than gains. It's wrong thinking, but at least this type of investor doesn't take a risk without knowing what he's doing.
Ideally, in any case, these people would be truly educated. The financial market is an instrument that will enhance money from work and was not created to make a lazy person rich.
When I say lazy, I'm talking about someone who doesn't make the effort to learn, to understand how everything works. These are people who, for the most part, work hard, are “jacks of all trades”, but commit the sin of believing and even acting believing in quick and easy enrichment.
He's the type who, sometimes, thinks he'll enter the financial market, work a little and earn a lot of money. It is not. The financial market allows you to take money from work, earned with a lot of sweat, and multiply it.
It is a tool that, if used well, then, yes, the more the investor works and applies his resources correctly, the more he will multiply his assets because he will be able to have the scalability that the financial market provides.
And it's not necessary to be one expert in finance to invest safely on the Stock Exchange. When I talk about not being lazy, I'm referring to learning the basics to understand the terms, knowing the difference between speculating with day trade and investing in the medium or long term, knowing the various ways of participating in the market.
Investing is not limited to buying shares. Our society has become poorly accustomed to fixed income, which does not require any knowledge. The person just deposits the money and waits for the right time to withdraw it with interest without realizing that the profitability paid is very low.
Investing in shares that pay dividends is the best way for an investor to multiply the money generated through hard work and achieve the long-awaited “financial freedom”. And, even better, when studying a little more about the market, the individual discovers that there is a strategy to make this dividend-paying action even more profitable, known to those who understand the subject as “options”.
To make it easier to understand how this strategy can change everything, let's take as an example an initial investment of R$50,000 with interest of 0.80% per month, the average result on the Stock Exchange.
The contributions will be R$1,000 per month for a period of 360 months. Well, in the end the R$50 thousand will have turned into R$2.97 million. It may seem like a good result, but imagine what the return would be if we managed to increase the monthly interest by 0.3%. It seems small, but this percentage can generate extraordinary results in the long term.
And 0.3% is something that anyone can do with conservative and safe options strategies. Adding this extra percentage, profitability would go from 0.80% to 1.1% per month. Considering the same term, initial amount and monthly contribution, in the end, the investor will have earned R$7.2 million.
In other words, R$4.23 million more in the same period and with little effort, just having a little more knowledge. Now, imagine if the addition was 0.5% and not 0.3%. The final value would be R$13.3 million.
There are several strategies that use options and that make it possible to exponentially increase the profitability of shares. Of course, not all shares have options and, among those that do, you need to look for those with good liquidity. It all depends on the person not standing still waiting for money to fall from the sky.
Acquiring knowledge doesn't hurt anyone. Like I said, it's a shame there's no financial education in schools. If there were, there would be no need to say that the market does not make lazy people rich.