"No warning can save a people determined to grow suddenly rich." Lord Overstone.
Hands up who wishes they'd sold up your equities and investment properties in 2007 and held their wealth in cash or other investment safe havens such as gold or government stock?
Hindsight is a wonderful thing when it comes to your hard earned cash being crunched.
Investors were lulled into a false sense of security during the first half of this decade. Property, they thought was: "as safe as houses".
Then there were companies with solid sounding names like Lombard Finance or Capital + Merchant Finance, which lured many to risk their cash unnecessarily.
Hopefully the days of Kiwis being conned by flash names or "ratings" from weird and wonderful little local agencies are gone. It could be argued that for a credit rating to be worth considering it needs to come from international giants Standard & Poors, Fitch or Moody's.
And pity the poor investors who went to an ANZ financial adviser and were told that ING's Diversified Yield and related funds were virtually as safe as money in the bank.
No investment is 100% safe. But in the scheme of things, government guaranteed deposit accounts in large international banks are pretty safe. Other "safe" investments include government bonds and AAA-rated corporate bonds.
Some experts consider commodities to be "safe" investments. That depends on how you invest in them of course. Gold, platinum, coal and water, to name a few are like property, in that you have something intrinsic in your hand, that can't simply disappear - although prices rise and fall with demand, which can be based on real events and/or market sentiment.
Commodity investments do form bubbles. What's more, many people invest in the companies that provide the infrastructure to extract commodities from the ground. In effect, they have still invested in shares.
The trouble with safe haven investments is they often don't make you as much money as more riskier propositions. Whilst money in an online savings account earns a highly competitive interest rate, shares or fund investments (such as the managed funds sold on Raboplus' platform ) well chosen should earn you more in the long run.
But it today's economic environment everyone can be forgiven for wanting some safety and certainty in their investments - providing they're part of a wider investment strategy.
But don't use the government retail investment guarantee to lull yourself into making unwise investments. The guarantee has given finance companies a new lease of life. It will expire on October 12, 2010, and you're on your own again after then - which is a good reason to have your money invested with a solid institution.
The final word goes to an argument from The Motley Fool, an international website that I rate highly. The Fool's argument is that "safe" is the investment that will grow most in the long run, in which case you'd be "safest" investing in growth stocks and other investments that have under shot their true value.