No one likes spending money on services, but, as we’ve all heard, you have to spend money to make money. At least, that’s how the saying goes. But if this time-tested adage is true, why are so many unwilling to spend money to make them better at trading? For a long while, I was in the no-spending camp. Now that I’m on the other side—willing to shell out $25 for something that saves me countless hours of frustration and boredom—it’s downright curious that I was so stubborn for so long. When dealing with services for money people, it’s natural that money people wouldn’t want to waste money trying to make more money, right? Confused? That’s because this line of thinking, while natural, doesn’t make a lot of sense. I think it’s important to reflect on how you were in order to look into the future. So I’m going to dissect why I was adverse to signing up for subscriptions, then explain how these subscriptions bettered my life. The first, as I mentioned, was downright stubbornness. After hearing so much about analytics programs that were making friends’ portfolios better, I simply thought that I was smarter than the experts. Why? Well, there’s a lot of noise out there. For every true expert, there’s a Jim Cramer. For every insightful post on the web, there's a hundred smart-alecks. And for every good subscription, there are a dozen that amount to little more than a scam. I don’t mean a scam in the stealing your money way, but I do mean a scam that you’re not getting what you need for services rendered. How many times have you been excited about something you’ve seen online, only to be disappointed, or only to read reviews that warn you to stay away. Beyond being stubborn and being apprehensive of being ripped off, I was also embarrassed. Plainly, I was worried that an analytic program would be too complicated for me to get any use out of it. I’d looked over some before—which I won’t name, as I don’t like to be negative—and I felt as if I was reading hieroglyphics. I didn’t want to pay $25 a month to feel as if I was taking an advanced calculus class. And then I found Chaikin Analytics and everything changed. Well, if you ask my wife, not everything—I’m still stubborn and skeptical. But I found something that worked for me. And worked well enough that I never blink at the $25 monthly fee on my credit card statement. At first, I was simply amazed that I could understand all the information that was being fed to me. It was clean, like looking at any normal webpage. And the charts and graphs were straightforward enough that I could decipher their meaning instantly. And then, as time went on, I realized how much time Chaikin Analytics was saving me, and how much it helped me earn. Gone were the hours of endless research— Chaikin Analytics did it for me. Finally, I loved that it clued me in to trends I’d not noticed on my own. For $25 a month, I’m ahead of the game and rich with time. If that’s not worth it, I don’t know what is.