When it comes to personal finances, I am quite conservative. I don’t have a significant amount of money to fund my retirement years, but I want to do whatever I can to make sure I don’t outlive my savings. And that’s why my investment philosophy is anything but aggressive.

I don’t take chances with speculative stocks and instead, I try to focus on slow, steady growth. I know there is potentially more to be gained in the short term by taking risks (i.e., the greater the risk, the greater the reward). But as a retiree, I am not willing to bet my future on dicey stocks.

Besides, while there has been a steady run-up of the stock market that started even before Trump won the election, I’m expecting the market to stumble and fall and I don’t want to be financially devastated when it happens, as I am sure it will.

I have a good friend who thinks that, by being so conservative, I’m leaving “money on the table.” Well, maybe I am. But whenever I go to a casino, which is not very often, my rule is to never bring to the casino more than I can afford to lose. So I go, I have fun, but even when I lose to the house, which is more often than not, I’m not in so deep that I am at risk of literally losing my house.

On a slightly different note, I’ve been racking my brain trying to figure out how to fit the word “susurrus,” which is today’s Word of the Day Challenge prompt, into this post. It’s a word I’d never heard before, so I Googled it and found out that a susurrus is “a soft murmuring or rustling sound; whisper.”

So with that in mind, should you hear a susurrus from me, that might just mean that my slow and steady growth approach to investing may not be going so well.

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Written for today’s Mindlovemisery’s Menagerie Tale Weaver prompt, which is all about growth, and for Fandango’s One-Word Challenge, “steady.” Also for the Word of the Day Challenge, “susurrus.”