Choose your investments WISELY!!!!

Whether you plan to take business and finance courses for business purposes or you're looking for a way to balance your finances, remember one important rule: double-check your investments thoroughly before you make them. Then double-check them again, and again, and again. This will help you to avoid careless mistakes and save you a great deal of money and headache. One word in particular comes to mind: Enron. The employees trusted the company stock because they worked for the company and invested most or all of their retirement money. When the company declared bankruptcy, the bottom fell out on these investments; and not only were the employees without jobs, their entire savings and investments were gone.

While such a drastic scenario may never occur with you or I, Berkeley students, we may still lose a substantial portion of our investments if we don't do the homework (background checks on the company, etc.). My professor shared with us that a friend of hers bought stock in a company without doing the background check on that company, and it cost him his entire investment. So the point is, just because you're familiar with a company does not mean that you should invest in said company until you do a thorough background check on the company: years in business, financial standing, liquidity, etc. If you have to learn a lesson, at least make it cost as little as possible.