This Is What We Signed Up For: Investing for the long term comes with terms.

Has there ever been a “good” time to invest? Think about this for a moment. Think of the last 3 decades and ask yourself, when was there ever a period of complete stability within the world, the economy, and the housing market? I’m drawing a blank – because such a time does not exist to my knowledge.


Instability has never been more prevalent than in 2025. Can you really turn on the tv today without hearing something to the affect of interest rates, recessions, real estate melt down, or the orange man south of the border? Virtually impossible. There has never been a better time than to be in the news media business with catastrophe d’jour everywhere we look.

One would think that this would not be the ideal time to invest, right? Well if history is any metric to go on (and really, it is the only forward looking metric we can use) then we know that despite every bit of economic turmoil around us, the markets simply do not care. They continue to tranche forward, despite what is happening all around us. The world class companies that we continue to invest it, that continue to innovate and drive forward year after year are going further with less and we as owners of these magnificent companies – we reap the incredible benefits in the months and years to come.

But isn’t this what we signed up for, after all? We knew this was part of the deal when we began our investing journey.

We knew that markets never move in a straight line, in fact they ebb and flow daily and its anyone’s best guess what will happen tomorrow or next week.

We agreed that markets  will go down – but they never stay down forever. No, quite the contrary. 

We know that temporary market fluctuations are part of the deal, this is all part of your wealth building journey we agreed upon years ago.

During the absolute lows of the Great Financial Crisis in 2009 the S&P500 dropped to 978 points. As I write today, the S&P500 sits at an astonishing 6,045 points. Think of the wealth created for millions of investors over these years – all they had to do was put away their monthly savings each month, not worrying about what happens to the economy, who the next president will be or where interest rates are going (because no one actually knows, not even your brother in law) and they became millionaires, slowly.

So what is our reward? What do we get out of the deal we agreed upon? 

We get a nest egg we will never outspend. We get an income that far exceeds are monthly expenses. We get to pass on generational wealth to our children and their grandchildren to help them buy their first home and go to university. Wealth that you will never be able to spend in your life time – that is why we invest, and that is what we signed up for.

Is it easy? Is there temporary pain involved? You bet. That’s part of the deal. If it was easy then everybody would be fabulously wealthy (and we know that less than 5% of Canadians are independently wealthy).

Once you accept that this is all part of the deal you agreed upon years ago, investing for the long term becomes a whole lot easier.