A dollar today is not worth a dollar tomorrow. One of the most basic tenants of finance and inflation. The sole purpose of investing is to beat inflation and ensure that your hard-earned dollars are in fact, worth more than the dollar that you have today. Traditional investments include bank instruments, insurance instruments, retirement instruments like 401Ks, IRAs, and the stock, bond, and commodity market. Bank instruments are stable, but they grow slowly. Insurance instruments are assets for your beneficiaries. The stock, bond, and commodity markets are instruments that can drive tremendous gains (and losses) in fortune. There are several forces that are out of the average investor’s control but with near constant attention to the markets, investors can do very well in the short term as well as the long term as long as they remember their short-term and long-term capital gains each year when the tax man comes calling. And then there is real estate. An ability to invest in something you can touch, live in, rent out, or just stare at. It may not grow (or shrink) as excitingly as the stock market but grow it does. With some good tax planning real estate investors can take advantage of things like building depreciation, and maintenance and repairs, which offset some of the income they make from real estate. Not to say that real estate does not carry risk and daily burdens but you have more control over what you can do with your real estate than you can as a shareholder of a corporation with millions of shares outstanding. Should real estate be the only thing you invest in? Absolutely not. But it has been the cornerstone in almost every generationally wealthy family and organization since time immemorial. Don’t take my word for it, ask the Queen of England.