Cramer: The Rich Don't Fret, but You Should

Everything's great over the long term...if you are really rich!

I am thinking that because of the pleasing words I always hear from really rich people on TV: really rich money managers and investors and analysts.

And it's true.

When you are really rich, things are great over the long term. When you are really rich you can go invest in those really good municipal bonds that yield more than treasuries, the ones that you have to buy in $500,000 increments typically, although maybe $100,000 will get you in. When you are really rich who the heck cares if you sit in cash for the next 18 months. It doesn't hurt you.

When you are really rich it is great to have cash and watch real estate go down to prices that are reasonable or be able to go to a bank and say, "What do you have in foreclosure?"

When you are really rich you can be like Warren Buffett and wait for stocks to be really cheap and if they aren't cheap enough you can do nothing. You can wait until there is blood on the streets and say, "I want to buy the great part of the muni reinsurance business from MBIA(MBI) and Ambac(ABK) and they can keep the bad stuff. Is that OK?"

These are really rich kind of questions asked by really rich people. You don't have to be concerned about finding stocks that have good yields that could go higher. The pursuit of the next Diebold(DBD) seems futile. Who the heck cares? The idea of trying to make money to make up for your paycheck's inability to rise, who cares? Some of these people don't need a paycheck, or they pretend to need one to seem like you.

I think about all of this because I sit here and read all of the things that people say about the fundamentals and I am just angry about it, and resigned, because if you are not really rich, it is real bad out there.

Your house is losing value -- and it is, stop kidding yourself, if you try to sell it, that house will be worth less than it is right now. You buy a house, it is like a car, it is worth less the moment it comes off the lot. Your portfolio is down big since October unless it was a portfolio of gas and gold and fertilizer.

These people who say "everything is sound" hate guys like me because my premise is that things aren't sound at all, but I am still going to try to find places to make you money because, well, that's what I did when things were bad. I still do it. I am thinking about people like the Yale money manager who criticized me for doing the exact opposite of what investors should do. Well, of course, if you are rich and you can do nothing for 10 years, then risk nothing.

But if you are not rich and you are never going to get rich if you do nothing, then you have to take some risks to do it. I am not about coming out on TV at night and saying "Sorry, you aren't going anywhere but down, and sorry you aren't rich."

That, however, is exactly what people said to me. I am glad I didn't listen to them but I do wish someone had been out there like me, saying with a lot of homework and a little bit of capital, and some common sense, you can get rich.