BST - My Income Portfolio: Financial Awareness

2025-03-10 13:50:52 ET

Summary

• The essence of financial awareness is to realize that money can work for us through our investments.
• Understanding the value of money is the first step toward financial education, which leads to the selection of the most appropriate tools for developing that awareness.
• In my case, the instruments I have adopted are largely high-income vehicles, with monthly and, in some cases, quarterly distribution.
• So I created a flow of money divided partly into constant payments over time and partly into variable payments on their due dates.
• In this article, I describe the source of distributions for each security in my portfolio over the past few years and demonstrate why financial awareness matters.

The 500 Lira Silver Coin

After the hard years following the end of World War II, Italy experienced an economic boom in the second half of the 1950s. The lira was strong and stable, and the Ministry of Treasury decided to return to the use of silver for a new issue of 500 lira coins, minted between 1958 and 1967 in three different types: the Caravels, the Unity of Italy, and the Dante Alighieri. Initially, the 500 lira silver coins were intended for circulation and were commonly used by Italian citizens, but later they became the object of hoarding, since the value of the raw material inherent in the coins exceeded their face value .

The word “hoarding” is a generic term used to denote the intentional and fruitless accumulation of movable wealth, coins or precious metals, for speculative purposes or in order to avoid the risk associated with financial investments. In the case of the 500 lira silver, the fact that they were within the reach of all Italians because they were produced in millions made them the object of a popular form of speculation that involved the entire country. People were attracted by the value of the fine silver contained in them, amounting to about 9 grams out of 11 of gross weight. Millions of Italians put them aside, hoping to make a profit from the revaluation of the price of the silver in them....

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