Last year I talked about six simple steps to follow when thinking about what the heck you should do when it comes to investing.

If you haven’t read it, that’s OK, everything’s going to be alright and I promise, my feelings won’t be hurt. But if you have, I think you’ll have at least some context around what I am about to say. What does Sunday have to do with anything? Absolutely nothing…just sounded cool.

Now, for those of you who don’t already know, I don’t blog for a living. It’d be fun, but no. Instead, I sit at a desk and do stuff with numbers and the markets. In other words, I’m pretty much as left-brained as you can get from 8 to 6 (or thereabouts).

Regardless of what I do, or what you do, we all ‘do’ RRSP season, n’est ce pas? Well guess what? We’re in it!  By the way, if you need some background on RRSPs in general, I think langley is a good place to start.

While I’m not here to give out financial advice (or advise, if you’re from the UK), suggest stocks, and/or explain how you can become a millionaire if you act now/purchase something/attend a seminar, what I am here to do is provide a suggestion given what I live and breath every day (and at least once a year in a more substantial way). After all, suggestions sometimes lead you to good service, no?

As I’ve mentioned before, millionairemommynextdoor has some excellent points when it comes down to personal investing. After all, she IS a self-made millionaire from the ground up (impressive). What she says in her post on market volatility supports what I’m here to tell you – get invested…especially now!

If you think about a perfect storm (minus Clooney and the gang) we’ve got a couple of things working in our favour:

1. the markets have taken a serious pounding of late, especially in the US (i.e., there’s an abundance of undervalued stocks and mutual funds out there);

2. the markets tend to trend upward over time (i.e., buy low…sound familiar?)

3. the strength of the Canadian dollar makes things ‘cheaper’ on a relative basis (apologies to my non-Canadian readers…but it’s about time!)

4. the outlook for the economy, especially in the States (US consumer debt levels, sub-prime mortgages, etc), continues to be bleak and we’re probably not going to shoot the lights out anytime soon…while this is not a ‘positive’ per se, to an investor looking for value it certainly is

I’m making a harsh generalization here, and going to sound a little bit like an infomercial, but if you act now, you’ll likely be experiencing some happy times ahead.

As Canadians, we’ve got until the end of February to make our ‘RRSP contributions’ for the 2007 tax year. With this in mind. I encourage you all to consider getting invested. No one can predict the future and if you could, you probably wouldn’t be reading this.

What I can say with some assurance, though, is that when this cruise ship of a market turns around, you probably don’t want to be on the wrong side of it.

darren