The best investment I've ever made...

Photo by Firmbee.com on Unsplash

My wife and I are good little suburbanite humans. We max out our her 401k every year, along with my SEP IRA. We don't go nuts with stocks, but sometimes I'll dabble in them, too.

I don't look at it often, because they say you shouldn't, but sometimes I look at our investments and wonder why none of them seem to go up unless I put money into them. They go up by the exact amount I invest and then sit at that spot until we put money into them again. Same story with annuities, and stocks, and even cryptocurrency, which I bought at the height of the market and have watched it plummet all year.

Only two investments we've ever made have gone up in value drastically over time. The first is our home, which has almost doubled in value since we bought it in 2012, a product of being in the right place at the right time.

The second is my investment in myself, and yes I use the word investment because that is what it is in the end. Every dollar I spend on my business ha…