Recap: As I wrote in Part 1, I have been relieved of my trading pass by Gaia for reasons unknown and am trying to keep my Gaia economic plans going via one of my mules while they correct their recto-cranial inversion.

Let me start by making one thing clear: I was not starting over "rags to riches" style. My mule had 1.5M in gold on her, which is enough to get started. It's not as much working capital as I like to have, but early on I recognized that I was going to have to follow the financial advice "don't think about what you HAD; think about what you HAVE". (That's from Suze Orman, a personal financial personality, and some of her advice is good. Some isn't.)

The next thing I recognized was that I was going to have to set priorities because I did not have enough resources to do everything I'd planned during the Christmas season. This is true of everyone starting out: there are a lot of good investment ideas running through this guild. And after you've been at this while, you have enough resources that you can take advantage of most of them.

When you're starting out, you can't. You don't have enough resources yet. You have to pick and choose.

My priorities were:
1. A new plan for Christmas gifts for my friends.
2. Obtain the items that were time-limited release that I knew I wanted for my avatar.
3. Take advantage of any investment opportunities that came along.

That meant I needed profit NOW rather than long term. As it's been pointed out in other threads, vending will net you far better profits far faster than investing. As long as you don't have an excess of gold, keeping that gold moving the MP is the best way to have it work for you. Investing is for when you have more gold than you can keep moving.

1.5M is not too much to keep moving. Which meant vending and Booty Grab.

Every time I was able to buy an item that I knew I wanted to invest in at a good price but had to turn around and sell for a profit now broke my heart a little. But again, I needed to raise gold NOW - Christmas was only 3 weeks away, I couldn't wait for 3 or 6 months. And more importantly, I could not tie up my working capital for that long.

Once I figured out what to get my friends for Christmas and had that plan more or less executed, I could afford to set aside an item or two for investment purposes. But I set myself a rule: for every item I kept as an investment, I had to earn back twice its cost before I'd allow myself to set aside another.

This worked remarkably well - it kept my capital growing but also let me start adding to my hoard. I wasn't trying to replicate the hoard on my main - since this started I have been moving forward under the assumption that I will indeed have access to those assets again, so items I was buying were fill in the spots I'd always intended to fill in.

As for the items for my avatar, I know from experience that prices are often their lowest while these items are still freely available, so it would be worth it to buy now, even if it meant sacrificing investments. Which I did - for example, I didn't have the resources to buy avatar items and RIG bundles.

I punted on the RIG bundles because a great deal of my happiness on Gaia comes from having the avi items I want most. For me, that's what all the gold is for - to make my time here more enjoyable. And while an investment that pays off is satisfying, it's not even in the same ballpark seeing a cat I adore on my avi smile .

But again, these are MY priorities. Yours may differ - but unless you know what they are, you can't very well organize your assets and activities to fulfill them. The point remains, though: when you have limited resources, you can't do everything, so you need to make decisions and follow through on them.

(Since this is getting long, I'll talk about vending, RIGs, and Booty Grab in another post.)