my mission is simple, to make you money. i'm here to level the playing field for all investors. there's always a bull market somewhere, and i promise to make you find it. "mad money" starts now. hey, i'm cramer. welcome to "mad money" welcome to cramerica. other people make friends, i want to make you money. i'm teaching and educating so call will me at 800 help 743-cnbc. things i have been keeping from you. tonight i'll do something about

it. tonight, i'll tell you who i am and how i got here. no, not i am jim cramer of "mad money" founder of the street. i want you to know more than that. although it did take me two years to learn "avatar" was a movie and a hash tag wasn't a number sign. i want to show you, by my own whacky standards is trace the arc that brought me to "mad money." not for some ego trip, but give you money making lessons from the phases of my career and how you are profit. in the end, this is cramerica! in short, i am going to give you the invest to cramer guide book and how i continue to learn every day to help you become better with the ultimate goal of mad money.

let's start early in the back of the time machine. my love of stocks did not begin in high school or college. my love of stocks started in fourth grade. that's right, fourth grade. you see, my dad would bring home the bulletin. at that point, one of the largest newspapers in the country when he returned from work every single night. i wanted it for the comics and the sports. i was a phillies fan. if i could go back into time, the only thing i would change is i would have made it so i was a yankee fan. we were only 89 miles south of new york. i was a curious kid. curiosity has always been a blessing and a curse of mine. anyway, there was always this solid chunk of the paper that seems impenetrable. et was called the business section. it had this giant list of names.

it seemed to go on forever. they were the other table, different from the batting average tables and box scores i would scrutinize with regularity. open, range, close, what open? what range? what close? what are these strange things? why did they matter? i asked my dad. occasionally, i would hear him get mad. >> buy, buy, buy, buy, buy. >> when he heard prices mentioned on the radio. he particularly seemed upset and got very angry when i heard the name national video on the radio and how it went out. i didn't know what national video did or why it went out. i did know -- i don't know if pops knew, either, what it did. i don't know. but i know it made him curious and i wanted to find out more about what these things were. so he sat me down and exchanged that each of those represented a performance of a stock. the rake was how low and how high it traded during the day and the close was how much it was worth when trading finished

for the day. it fascinated me. how could there be so many companies ask why in the heck did they trade in ranges. he described to me that people tried very hard to figure out each day which stock went up and they wanted to buy it so they could make money from their increases. it struck me as down right silly. i told him when i was looking at the baseball tables i always tried to figure out who was high, who was down. he said it was pretty much the same with stocks, that some players were doing okay, were were hot as a pistol. i said i wanted to figure out which were going to go higher just like everyone else was trying to figure it out. it seemed to me that the radio was always on. most of the news was about the war, the war in vietnam and it was frightful and scary. even when i was 9 years old, my

mom was worried i would have to go to war. right after the news, they always mentioned the dow jones, the stocks that had done the better or the worst. national video was on the worst things, hence the anger. what i did was write the names down that i heard and i tracked them. i kept them in this ledger, this ledger that i still have. how did klm go out? there's mgm, xerox, polaroid. zenith went up a lot. i would go over each one each day and put them down. there's a winner.

there's a winner. anyway, so it was a game. i was just trying to figure tout next move of a stock, even if all i really knew was, frankly, the name continental or the name rca. whatever. most of them were defense stocks. they went up a lot in tandem with the war i heard about. so i followed a bunch of those along with the others. after a year, i thought, this was a cool name. i wanted to introduce it to my fifth grade class, so i did. going in and showing them my ledger, inviting everyone to play to see who could find stocks that went up the most the next week. not everyone was as interested as i was. my dad's company, the national giftwrapping box company which later was international packaging represented them corp., then the minnesota mining and manufacturing company.

right about fifth grade, pop came home with a new line of 3m products that i was selling called the bookshelf games. that's right. they got into what's known asm bookshelf games. he said perhaps i might want to learn more about how the stock market worked and how the company had created two games about business, about acquire, takeovers and stocks and bonds of which i am fortunately enough to have gotten a real honest to god copyright here coursesy of george who gave it to me for the holidays. i almost cried when i saw this. i loved the game so much. shady brooks development, i think justin, one of our camera people had that won. subsequently, i asked the ceo of 3m to bring these games back. i don't know if he will. but the point i mention at all is from my own mix of games, the stocks and bonds, is that stocks are fascinating enough. i promise you to get your kids started on them right now. particularly when you have games like stocks & bonds.

pick some stocks. maybe not all defense companies, although they're performing in an odd way. but if companies are familiar to your kids, have them track them. get them started early. and you know what? maybe they'll play for life. alas, the stock market is a long-term contest. and one i think the earlier you get in, the more you can whip. i'm going to mickey in new york. mickey. >> i was investing quite young. i was wonder wag type of changes i should make to my portfolio as i get older.

>> what i need you to do is find some conservative stocks that give a good yield and shift over time from the high growth stocks and national partnerships. rick in arizona, rick. >> hello, mr. cramer, how are you? >> real good. how about you? >> i'm doing great, sir. watching your show a couple weeks ago, you mentioned your bucket list and wanting to attend the indy 500. i have a bucket list, as well, of things i want to do and places i want to visit during my retirement. because of following your advice these last four years, i am well on my way to being able to do those things. >> that's fabulous. >> thank you so much. >> my question for su i have a couple of young children. what advice and what central items or ideas on investing concepts do people need to know when they start learning about the market and investing themselves? >> the first thing they need to

know is what they own. and the idea behind that is to own things like disney, domino's pizza if you like mcdonald's. go to the mall, go to costco, go to places that you're familiar with. buy a share, one share. get him or her involved. get them started early. teach your kids about the market. it is a very valuable lesson. and there are many more coming up on this special edition of "mad money." on. we'll be right back. don't miss a second of "mad money." follow, @jimcramer on twitter. have a question? sent jim a question at #madtweets. send jim an e-mail to mad money@cnbc.com or give us a call at 1-800-743-cnbc. miss something? head to mad money.cnbc.com.

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welcome back to a bizarrely "mad money." i am trying to teach you life

lessons from investsing from my life. i have stumbled around the stock market long enough to learn a thing or two. tonight you're getting some of that wisdom from the school of hard knocks. don't you always love it at the beginning of a football game where snef the player say his name and school and some players say the school of hard knocks? that's what i attended when it came to stocks. you're getting the online version right here, right now. the greatest game, stocks & bonds with its stock certificates and its game board and all the little cool doodads. what would send a stock higher? that's what this was all about.

i left the stock market games behind me by the time i got to middle school. which by the way they then called junior high. my obsessions became sports. i was the second fastest guy in the school forever, so i ran track. and then, of course, girls whose movements were more lucid than even the ranges of stocks. i couldn't win for losing. but that's the subject of a different show. however, my father did engrain in me the desire to save. early on, i learned that even in high school, you've got to save. i saved even as i bused tables at the old block & cleaver which we called the block and cleavage because we were hilariously stupid back then and ultimately graduated into selling ice cream. very quickly, i learned the power of market power.

specificsly specifically, cornering the market. i paid people to give me the exclusive right to sell ice cream, hey, chocolate, on the 600 and 700 level. can you imagine how much money could be made if you had the whole franchise the upper deck? i made a fortune except for the one time they gave me only strawberry ice cream. talk about having to run from a customer after you sold him that stuff. when lefty was on the mound, he pitched so quickly and got players out so fast that i would get stuck with unsold ice cream, which you had to buy from the company before selling it and i would take a real beating. talk about learning how business worked. the shelf life of on ice cream on a hot july night after the ninth inning is about as short as short can be. funny, during the lightning round i midwest jest with you about your name. i'll call you hey, captain or skip or chief. i learned those names at the ballpark. that's what people called me to

get my attention to buy ice cream. frankly, i loved it for its bizarre intimacy. i never forgot the intimacy, hey, bud, hey, partner. i opened up an account with fidelity, the magellan fund. @jimcramer on twitter i should be referring you to those all the time. i didn't save for that when i got to college. the money paid was work study, anyway. it went to my tuition, room and board. after i got out of the college, rejected by more than 50 papers, i kept the letters and i'm going after -- i mean, i kept did letters, i landed a position making $156 a month. i still kept a tattered pay stub from those days in my wallet to remind me how hard it was when i got started, how poor i was.

nevertheless, i contributed putting a few dollars away when i could. then when i got a horrible job making $179, not long after my sojourn began in los angeles, i found a bungalow apartment in the fairfax district. pretty sketchy, around the corner from pioneer chicken which was way too expensive for me to go to. soon after i was stocked,s at the time i was assigned a story in san diego, a horrible school shooting. when i returned, everything was gone. so it began, my terrible but actually somewhat thrilling six months of living in my car, basically trying to get by. the only up side when you met a woman, it was pretty easy to figure out the end of a night

query, your place or mine. now, i know this isn't normal behavior. but i knew my ultimate goal was to save so i could get an apartment. i was living hand to mouth. sometimes people would take me in so i could get a shower and change. but you know what? i never quit saving. i remember cashing my paycheck every other week and writing a check to fidelly magellan fund for what i could afford. how poor was i? yet still putting money away. then i got mononucleosis then jaundice liver, a yellow spot, like a potato projection on my stomach, i had no health care.

the company mercilyl0usly put me on the road. so i had to go to a migrant farm workers' clinic and get fixed up there. i still put money away even as i was making my weekly trips to the migrant farm clinic. i had a doctor that was pretty much one of the best i ever had. giving money to the best stock picker of all time, i managed to add it up 35 years later to save enough money to teach. money amounted to a fund well into the six figures. not because of my capital edition, but because of the power of compounding. an amazing investor at the helm made a ton of money. i never touched it, just let it build. i think the take away here from the distorted chapter of my life is what i would you to do is save no matter what. obviously, the earlier the better through thick and thin. when cnbc has all of those managers on, you don't have enough time or money to handle your own stock portfolio, send the money in as little or as much as you can. if i could still send those checks to the fidelity magellan fund when i was living in my car

and saved by a pistol in my sight, the most down and out you can be in this country, you can put away some money, too. after the break i'll try to make you more money.

we're riding the magical money mystery tour. and i'm giving you the life lessons i have learned the hard way through decades of stock investing. i told you first about how to get your kids started early. and then i told you about how nothing should ever stop you from investing. if i could invest while living in the back seat of my 1977 ford fairmont. i know you can, too. right now, i want to tell you about how i got started in individual stock picking, something you know i love and still believe in. even the you're seemingly in periods of chaos, chicane. it's still totally worthwhile if not lucrative and, yes, it is the reason i believe you watch, that is, unless you love the funny outfits that i occasionally don and the outrageous courtesy of when i used to have a radio show called "real money." if you were picking stocks

playing with real money, not just with a ledger or with the game stocks & bonds, you need an account. when i got started in 1979. there was no such thing an an online account. i chose to put my individual stock account with fidelity. i didn't know where to put my ideas. i turned to forbes. now, people at forbes, do not take this personally. i read an article about american agronomics, a terrific orange grower in florida. and it seemed to be compelling. so i bought ten shares of it for $9. a week later, a frost hit. wiped out the entire crop. my investment was cut in half. i was devastated, but not defeated. i sold it out, took the capital and bought seven shares of bobby brooks which, again, forbes said could be a terrific buy. i ever had never heard of it. almost immediately, they reported a bad quarter and i

lost the money i invested again. i was living at a less than swank studio in manhattan, the cheap $400 a month rent, albeit twice the rent for a beautiful one bedroom in tallahassee and a heck of a lot more than the back seat of a car but it allowed me to restock my coffers. i was on the road quite a bit back then. after a particularly hard night on the town, so to speak, research ago story in kentucky, i fell in love with a breakfast at bob evans farms. finding out that it was publicly traded and when i went back home, i visited the huge fabulous new york manhattan new york public library, the one with those big lions in front of it, and devoured everything i could about bob evans farms. they had magazines with articles, microfiche of s.e.c. filings. they were four months old, but take it when you can get it. i knew i had a good one. i bought 20 shares. the stock went up immediately on a good quarter and the stock split. and i figured out the first good

component of investing, know what you own. like it, even. what did i know about growing oranges? who knew about women's fashion? but a good plate of scrambled eggs and sausages served by an attractive setting. a company that had a long tradition of service and plans to expand in the midwest? that was for me. next up, standard press steel. scooters for plains, something alcoa now dominates. why sps? because a buddy of mine from high school catching up with me told me, listen, jim, if you're in the gym, they're hiring like mad at sps.

hiring? great. he said sps is paying good money. i had a job. back to the library, solid income, not much debt. it doubled not long after and i caught the bug for good. 23 years later, sps would be acquired by precision cast parts. the preeminent plight supplier to aircraft around the globe. so now i'm figuring it out. the best investment ideas do not come from these magazines. they come from what you know. when you meld that information with information from public sources, even if they are as late and as hard a source as taking taking a surreptitious trip to the new york public library when you're supposed to be working, that's good enough. now, i didn't like the random way i was making money. a friend from home with a lucky call available with jobs available, a hearty breakfast at bob evans farms, there has to be a more methodical way, don't you think? and then it hit me. look around at work. at the time i was covering mergers and acquisitions. profiling some deals that were on, it seemed that every other

deal was in the oil patch. one after another, small to mid sized oil companies were waiting to be acquired. i went back to the public library, took out some edition of value lines and checked out the pages devoted to oil companies. i then referenced them with other research, magazine articles to find out which ones would be acquired without problems, either because they were public without a family owning them or because they seemed to fit the same parameters that other deals i was reading about. i set on a deal called natomis. it was an oil company that was a real gusher in indonesia. i didn't have to wait long until mcgee bought them. i almost doubled my money. if i want to buy takeovers, buy companies that would do well on their own but was undermanaged. which was the consensus that i found by reading articles. that meant another oil company with bigger scale could do more with natomis, which was cheaper than it should be if it simply got rid of the management. as much as i had hit some winners, though, i was distraught that i had given up the ghost of those first few

trades i mentioned. at the time i had been hanging around the track on weekends, though. mostly aqueduct. i started thinking here. i had learn how to handicap by reading the books by andy buyer. i was addicted to the track. he wrote two books. they may be the second best investment books after peter lidge's books that i mentioned earlier. it teached discipline, how do i identify the best thoroughbreds to bet on, going out to the tracks where the information was less well known and, please, don't bet willy-nilly on every horse in each race because you're looking for something to do. find the ones with the payoff, bet sure, big, cut your losses if you're having a bad run. think about it, every one of these lessons could be applied to the stock market. you can take a huge swing when you know when you're doing. don't just gamble for the stocks for the excitement of it. most important, be disciplined. don't let your losses pile up. after five years of professional journalism, i decided to hang it up and go back to law school. the good news? i saved enough to pay for my first year all through the stock market.

i would i would never have been able to make enough had i just kept it in a saving account. and by the way, let's be clear, an index fund would have made me nothing, nothing at all. if you want to go and get started, go small. invest in what you know. research it intensely. back then, i got old data from the public library. now information is free, ubiquitous. including up to the minute financials, analyst presentations, conference calls that i tell you are musts if you're going to know what you are doing. simple? no. lucrative? you bet it is. kiann in new york. frank in arizona, frank. >> caller: jim, whenever i'm considering selling or buying a stock, i look at the bid price, the stock price, sometimes that range is narrow and sometimes it is wide. how is that information useful when determining if it's time to pull the trigger? >> if you like the stock, i'm going to tell you that's irrelevant. if you want to hold the stock for a while, you have to hold it

and forget about that bid aspect. i used to buy stocks that used to say could drive a stock through them, maybe even a dollar spread. things are much easier now. don't worry about the spread.

tonight's show is all about learning from my attendance at the university of hard knocks. i am taking you through the importance of getting started early and saving no matter what. i am shown you how to stay disciplined. now i'm going to give you a sense of how you can become a trader if you want to. okay? and you want to be a good one. this show has changed from time and time again. it's been on for so long. in the last 500 shows, i've deliberately moved away from trading and more towards investing. i've done so because there are so many more object tackles to trading than investing. you have to watch your position like a hawk where it's hard to do your job and follow the market.

there's so many different products allowing hedge funds to move around stocks like they're toys. you're going one-on-one with the big boys if you attempt to try trading at home. certainly at work. there's some advantages you have now that you sure didn't have when i started trading in my law school dorm back in 1981. first, commissions are so, so much lower so you can get in and out without much friction and with much more after commission profit. second, information is in your personal computer or even your smartphone, third, trading slightly faster. when i was at kraft within i had to use pay phones, no cell. you often had to wait while some kid chatted endlessly and aimlessly to his girlfriend.

at the same time, i had to go with what i knew. i knew individual stocks. for all of the stories about harvard law, including the movie paper chase, i can tell you that there was a ton of downtime and a real good business library nearby that had research the brokers turned out as well as upto date microfiche, according to the reports -- that's what they used to come in -- all things i considered i possessed probably the best publicly information available around at that time. the first thing i decided to do was to work on one trading idea per week. my reasoning was pretty simple. you can't be all over the map if you were doing this as a hobby. even a time intensive one. i figured i couldn't take a lot of chances until i knew what i was doing. a very valuable lesson for you if you want to start trading. i discarded all the of ideas looking for stocks that had catalysts or upcoming mergers. an article on the front page might be talking about a break

through in medicine, a new oil find. i got on a roll and that was when i first started writing about the market. i wrote a newsletter which i actually only sent to my papers. i would do no trade if i couldn't explain what the company did and why i liked it and what happened. i had that level of discipline. no buying of anything that didn't have an exit strategy from the moment i put it on. an important lesson made disciplined by a written thesis before i pulled the trigger. when you trade, trade with confidence. let me ask you, you could easily be shaken up by the broader market if you aren't. you want to trade with

confidence? ask yourself, would you be willing to put a stock recommendation on your voice mail, on your answering machine and update it every week? hi, this is jim cramer. i'm not here right now but i like monotu for the next week. el, i actually did that. i was putting my money where my mouth was and managed to get augment the winnings with work i was able to get from my old employer and some legal work from a professor who moonlighted on cases. it wasn't long after that that marty parrot tried to get me to write a piece. i neglected to call him back. so he inadvertently got three weeks of trades of the week and they were all successful off that answering machine. he told me to meet him at a coffee house nearby. when i did, he wanted to give me $500,000 to manage. i said i didn't think i was capable of handling anywhere near that amount. he said he had confidence in me.

shortly after, he gave me a check for $500,000. which by the way was real money back then. i had it in my hands. it was like, who he, too hot to the touch. i ran down to fidelity and set up another account, went right to work trading. almost immediately i lost a ton of it. >> the house of pain. >> sell, sell, sell. >> i could see how i was i would have to wash dishes and mow the lawn at marty's house to blow away the money i brew away in three days. my mistake, as clint eastwood told us in "magnum force." a man has to know his own limitations. you see, you can't trade a huge chunk of money at once. it was a total violation of all my discipline. you can't put it to work at all once. you can't put it all to work at once. knowing that you'd be done, whether at work or not, i violated my own rules and i had blown it.

i confessed to marty my sins and said he should take the money back. instead, he wanted to give me more money. he was betting i had learned my lesson. you know what? he was right. i reverted to my old style, trying to be right about one idea at a time, going big when i had the most conviction. the way any trader would do. i slowly by surely made it back while also paper invested a more active and is not truly trading portfolio. that would become the beginning of my actual professional investing career which you will hear about at the moment. here is the bottom line. if you're going to trade, make sure you have a catalyst, an exit point where there's something that's supposed to happen and you are out of the stock either way because you are trading, not investing.

you need conviction and you have to ask yourself, would you be willing for the world to hear hi, it's me, it's not here right now, but i want you to take a swing at disney ahead of the big analyst meeting? if you can do all those things, start small, give it a try. stay with cramer.

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through the tightest doors and hallways. more reliable. hoveround employees build your chair, deliver your chair, and will service your chair for as long as you own your chair. most importantly, 9 out of 10 people got their hoveround for little or no cost. call now for your free dvd and information kit. you don't really have to give up living, because you don't have your legs. hoveround replaced the legs. and now every hoveround comes with this handy tote bag and cup holder for access to your favorite items. and right now, get this limited edition hoveround america travel mug free with your hoveround delivery. [singing] hoveround takes me where i wanna go. call or log on to hoveround.com to find out where a hoveround can take you!

welcome back to this special autobuy graphical "mad money." i had been courted by goldman sachs for three years before i got a job. it was then called security sales. helping individuals and small institutions manage their money. i got a continue of history of those shares as well as what i talked about earlier in "the conventions of a street addict. "on " but tonight aes show, like every "mad money" is about learning how to trade and investing by studying with me at the university of hard knocks. not just to give you funny, cool stories.

it's fun to have fun, but i'm about making the money. first, that's where i began to understand the progress of actual money management, not just picking a stock here or there, but the process. the ability to build a portfolio from the ground up. i had the best teachers in the world. lee cooperman put on a new investment clinic each day. of which i never missed a session. hardly an hour went by when i heard about a great new to explore. but you know who i really learned from? my customers. chiefly wealthy individuals from all walks of life. it was at goldman that i learned something that these days can't be understood by so many professionals at this business. that is individuals actively beat the market regularly. i can tell you i saw it with my

own eyes. when i was at goldman, i had wa is known as nondiscretionary accounts. meaning i wasn't allowed to vote with my own money or my own ideas. unless i could win them over to make the purchase. remember, i was on commission and made money only with the buys or sells i could convince people to act on. that's where i learned how important it was to with the individual. i was able to articulate that stock's idea in a way that made sense. can you do that with someone if you were to pick a stock? you had to know your stuff. i often asked the buyers whether they knew enough about their stocks when they wanted to buy on their own. i wanted them to be as educated as possible about the securities they were buying. it's because i knew that stocks

go down. and i knew that if they went up, it would be their idea. and if the stocks went down, it's on me. just human nature. i learned that very quickly. what else did i learn? how about humility? it was at goldman sachs that i first figured out how humbling the business could be. a great bull market had just started not long before i was hired. almost all stocks have tremendous tailwinds. but when one of your ideas went against you, you had to get on the horn and explain either why the person should buy more or whether they should to cut their losses. that's why you have to recognize what to do when stocks go against you. i also learned to let your gains run while you could cut your losses and when to cut those losses. i learned the hard way. most of my clients were business people who didn't know a lot about stocks. they had been entrepreneurs,

inventors, that kind of thing. i had a real cantankerous client. a real estate tycoon. he had worked hard to get where i was. i was working hard to try and get him as a client, trying to win him over. i told him i would be judicious. that i would work hard and i would get it right by him. he said point-blank that he didn't want to trade. no trading, jim. he liked only long-term investments. at the time, i liked kimberly clark, the paper company, one which i have liked forever. still do. i told him i thought this would be terrific for his portfolio. he agreed. i got it. i got the sale. he told me to buy a thousand shares. i got it! almost immediately it went up eight points. it was a dream. i had a winner. so i called him and i said, bob,

i want to ring the register. i want to sell the 1,000 shares of kimberly clark. i thought he'd thank me. but he was furious. he told me i said kimberly clark was good for the long-term, making great games over time. he wasn't the least bit interested in only making $1,000. then he questioned my integrity, wanted to know if i was trying to churn him, a horrible charge meaning i was just trying to generate commissions with his money. you know what? i was scorched and torched. but he did treat me a great lesson. if you don't want to turn a trade into an investment because that's usually a sign that use basing a loss and trying to cement why you're in it. you don't want to turn an investment into a trade. if you have a good one, let it run for heaven's sakes. bob was right. kimberly ultimately doubled and i was vindicated, despite myself. finally, i learned the science

behind building a portfolio and understanding wealth. a lot of my business involved contacting the people who had just come into a great deal of cash, either through inheritance or through business. they tend to be rather unsophisticated about the cash management. i regarded my first job as listening to their needs, trying to figure out what they wanted. they were conservative? did they want capital preservation? meaning they didn't want to risk their money to make a little bit of it. were they aggressive? did they want capital appreciation? build that wealth quickly. i tried to get to know them and urge them to try to get to know themselves just as you should know yourself. just as much as you want to get rich quick, you want to get rich carefully. do you want to participate in new issues? try that. it could be risky.

do you want to try to hit it out of the park with some of your capital? of course, many of you are familiar with these lessons. you've heard me say them on many a night. i'll try to teach you what to know yourself. to know what you can handle and can't. when i first got to goldman is sachs, the oil was as hot as a pistol. you have to understand those were different days. they struck out oil. we could find out how big the finds were. those finds were pretty available back then. so everyone got caught up in oils. every day seemed like a great day in the oil patch. services, drillers, you name it. then one day the commodities starting plummeting in price. the global tensions that had jacked up the price were settled, they had cooled.

the bull morphed into a bear. we were crushed. while i occasionally violated the rules on this show, i never again intentionally avoid diversification. i almost lost everything i worked hard to get. here is the bottom line. i learned the core principles of investing, finding solid ideas to create long-term wealth in a way that benefits the customer. that includes, by the way, no margin buying. consider yourself the customer of this show. all of my investors consistently beat the market on ways of their own aided by people like me who worked with them to consciously put a plan into action. "mad money" is back after the break.

you follow my stocks, you lived with me with my .22 caliber pistol in the back of a car to understand the need to save and you learned how to follow the good ideas. i want to remind you when you hear from the gray beards that is you can't make money at home and have to give the money to a professionals, it's the story of my life and every turn is very much the opposite and that you can make money in many different ways with managers, brokers and yes, gloriously, by yourself.

stick with cramer. stick with cramer. >> you have the courage to fight for us. >> you are an honest man with guts. >> thanks for teaching me and putting me in charge of my future. >> it is time to take charge of yours. >> "mad money" with jim cramer. cnbc.

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i would like to say there is always a bull market somewhere. i will find it here for you on "mad money." i'm jim cramer. see you next time. your financial blinders before it is too late. everybody watching is thinking, "well, how does she do that? how do you spend $3,000 more per month than the money you have coming in?" you do so by putting it on what, tammy? >> credit card. >> because you didn't say no to the little things that the kids wanted all of these years, you now are going to have say no to the big things that they want as well. and you ask me, "can i afford it?" >> i want to go on an african safari and a mountain-gorilla excursion with my daughter shane, and it's only $28,000.