Move Your Assets! (from Wall Street to Main Street)

Where do you have your investments?  Is your money sitting in a bank earning you next to nothing?  Do you own stock in companies you really know nothing about?  Are you invested in bonds and waiting for the Fed's other shoe to drop? And worst of all, do you know in your gut that insider manipulation now makes a high-risk joke of traditional investment practices? After all, it’s not as if we all haven’t been warned:

“Nearly five years after the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers touched off a global financial crisis, we are no safer. Huge, complex and opaque banks continue to take enormous risks that endanger the economy.”

We’re All Still Hostages to the Big Banks by Anat R. Admatil;

The New York Times, The Opinion Pages,  August 25, 2013

But for most of us, it’s scary to change our investing habits, and hard to know what to do instead -- even when a change is clearly appropriate. However, there is an alternative to the old distant and disconnected ways of putting your money to work, one that is gaining momentum right here in the Pioneer Valley and in locales all around the country: it’s local investing. With local investing (“putting your money where your hearth is”), you not only know better what your money is doing, but in the process you can actually help your neighbors and increase your community’s economic resilience.

On Monday evening, January 13th (snow date January 16), at the Massachusetts Green High-Performance Computing Center in Holyoke, Invest Here Now is offering a free panel discussion about local investing; you’ll learn about the benefits and the risks, and options such as crowd-funding and local loan funds. The entire event will run from 7:00-9:00 PM, including ample post-panel time to network with the presenters and others interested in local investing.