The Bolt

I would revise Marc's advice from "[...] you should put your money in the bank" to "[...] you should pay off your debt". This includes the mortgage on your home. Any amount that you make on the stock market isn't actually earned until you sell your stocks, but the amount that you owe on credit cards and mortgage is real. And from what I've seen most people don't manage to sell at the right time - whenever that is! Sure a few do manage to do so, but for the majority of us when we sell is dictated by something else in our lives. Usually retirement. I know a lot of people who were supposed to retire in the last few years but they couldn't, and now they are still working because their money is tied up in stocks.

The other reason that I think debt should be paid off is that the interest rates that we are charged on our outstanding debt is again usually fixed, and sometimes high. The amount that people can earn or lose from the stock market is highly variable. It seems outrageous to me that all of the mutual fund companies always say that "past performance does not guarantee future results", yet I have never met a financial advisor who truly believed that. Whenever I talk with financial advisors, they always tell me that I should invest in mutual funds because they will make me more money in interest than I am paying on my mortgage. When I ask them how they know this, they point to the past performance of the mutual fund. How blissfully ironic, and to me somewhat insulting.

No thanks, I'm paying down my mortgage because I am positive that I owe that money. That I CAN guarantee.