What does Omnicron mean for your finances?

This week: What does Omicron mean for your finances?

In this week's Mel's Money Musings I talk about Omicron, Delta and how we're learning about the greek alphabet via Covid. But more importantly, what these new variants mean for your finances.

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Transcript

Hey, and welcome to another week of Mel's Money Musings.

Little, teeny bit more glammed up this week thanks to a photoshoot today, but that's okay. We are not expecting to see this every week.

Uh, so today I wanted to talk about COVID and the variance to COVID and what that's doing and what it means for your finances. Cause certainly we welcomed Omnicron to the party in the last couple of weeks.

And certainly in Australia, I don't know around the world, we're seeing more and more talk of Omnicron. And we saw the markets react initially when a new variant was announced and they reacted as you might typically expect with trepidation and many markets experienced a fall. Certainly in Australia, we saw that. So these fluctuations or gyrations, if you like, I think we can expect to see that every time that there is a new variant of COVID that is released or discovered, and let's be honest, we are going to find more. This is a neat way of learning about the Greek alphabet, right?

 It's more and more variations will come. And I think what we'll see is the market will initially react strongly and then it'll settle down as governments start to feel their way and we start to understand what the latest variation of the virus means.

But ultimately I think what we'll see is a flattening of those fluctuations, a flattening of those gyrations, as we simply realise that more variations are the norm; they are to be expected. And as we see a rollout of the precautions that we simply come to expect once that hits.

Now what it means for you and your finances is yes, in Australia, the tech sector has been hammered and certainly the market generally has been lower in the last few days since Omnicron really bashed the party.

But long term, if your financial goals are long term, if your financial goals are to continue to invest in the share market long term, then you are going to be buying whilst the market drops and you are gonna be buying when the market peaks.

When is either going to happen at its most extreme, who knows, unless you have a crystal ball, you really can't answer that.

But if you are continuing to invest regularly and for the long term, then really these short-term fluctuations might make you feel uncomfortable if especially if you're a new share investor and you are not used to that.

But if you're a long-term share investor, it shouldn't make a difference. And as to should you buy a property and interest rates etc, again if that is a long term decision, then again these short term fluctuations aren't going to matter.

And we've already talked in the last few musings around property prices and interest rates. And I want you to have that same long term view for that as you would for the share market.

Yes. I believe we're going to see more and more variations of COVID, but already we're seeing the markets start to adjust. We're seeing them start to realise that, hey, Omnicron isn't one that perhaps what we need to be as concerned about. If there is another Delta, sure, that might be a rockier ride, but my suggestion to you is to expect fluctuations, to expect gyrations.

And that way, when they happen, you can go, huh? Yep. Expected this. And your choice is, at that point, to if it's for the long term to simply keep doing what you were doing because over 30 years, it simply doesn't matter.

If you've got questions, if you've got feedback or something that you wanna see covered on Mel's Money Musings, simply reply to this email, or flick me an email at hello at Melissa Brown dot com dot au, or flick me a DM in Insta at 'more money for shoes'. Until then have a great weekend. And I'm going to be washing this all off shortly. I can't deal with it.