The idea of letter to 16-year-old self is thought provoking. What advice to give the younger you if you could reach across the years? For some, it could be a long imploring treatise in an attempt to sidestep embarrassments and pitfalls of a best-forgotten past. Many would embrace common themes of acceptance and courage, scattered with some well-considered words of wisdom. Wisdom most didn’t possess as a naïve adolescent. Wisdom by definition hard earned through mistakes and experiences made and had along the way.  That have fashioned us into the complex and interesting people we are today. 

Jill and I have the opportunity to talk to girls in this impressionable teenage stage, and we often wonder as we walk away whether any of them will take heed of our beseeching messages: Pay attention to your finances. Start now. Take, and keep, control. These, plus other salient lessons on personal finances - just one, but nonetheless vital area of a developing woman’s journey. So we ponder: does the metaphorical penny ever drop or does each of us have to learn through painful experience? Would it be better to render our self-addressed letters to the scrapheap and allow ourselves to head through the hard times in the expectation they will hone us like steel?
 

Perhaps it is more opportune to consider what we can tell ourselves today. We do have control over the choices we have in the years ahead so let’s put aside our dwelling in the past and consider rather what the future may bring. Looking at the cards we hold now, how can we optimise our prospects? We are presented with the same problem as all those years ago – with all the options we face, the path isn’t always clear.
 

Take investing for instance; there are as many opinions on the road ahead as there are experts. Go to Cash, say the prudent and paranoid, the unraveling euro zone spells Armageddon in equity markets. Buy now, risk takers advise, easing monetary policy in China means structural growth stocks will lead the equity market higher. Stay your course, counsel the pragmatic, shares will still deliver reasonable returns in the form of dividend yield in a world where deposit rates are falling. Trés confusing and, as we know from history - no one really knows. So what to do?
 

Short of receiving an express delivered letter from your future 70 year old self, all we can do is to keep making well-informed and pro-active decisions and hold off recriminations if things don’t turn out the way we expect. There’s risk in everything we do that’s remotely worthwhile – that’s what living is about after all.  So, let’s promise ourselves: No Regrets! Onwards and upwards to 2012 - a year we will embrace to the full with all the ups and downs that life and the equity market is bound to throw at us. Until then, be safe.