CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO RICK’S COLUMN: Download 100_pound_kitty.mp3

As long-time readers know, over the years I have had a love/hate relationship with cats. Maybe a better term would be a like/hate relationship. Okay, maybe it’s a barely tolerate/hate relationship.

An article on the front page of the daily newspaper this week kicked that relationship up to a whole new level. The article featured a picture of a half-grown mountain lion in a tree. That’s not so unusual. We have mountain lions in the Black Hills, and pictures of them aren’t exactly rare.

The reason this cat made the front page was its location—in the back yard of a home that’s just a valley and a ridgeline away from my house. This kitten, plus its mother and a sibling, had apparently moved into town. You have to admit that they have good taste; they relocated to Carriage Hills, one of Rapid City’s most expensive neighborhoods.

It’s exactly their good taste, or their taste for what’s good, that bothers me. I don’t appreciate living in the vicinity of carnivorous cats who are big enough to swallow either of my kids in one gulp. One of the reasons we moved to this neighborhood a couple of years ago was so my wife and kids could be closer to nature. That was fine as long as "nature" meant wild turkeys, bunnies, and deer. Mountain lions are something else again.

My first instinct as a parent is to either lock the kids in the house from now on or start making plans to move back into the middle of town where nature isn’t quite so natural. On second thought, I realize neither of those would be a practical solution.

Instead, I need to see this danger realistically. My kids aren’t out exploring the neighborhood ravines at night, so their chances of encountering a mountain lion are remote at best. The current family of urban lions are being tracked and removed, so they won’t be a risk for long. We don’t put out feed for the deer or turkeys, so we aren’t making our yard into a tempting mountain lion buffet. We’re probably more at risk of being attacked by a mountain lion than of being hit by a meteor, but it’s still a risk too slight to lose sleep over.

My first reaction to this lion story, though, reminds me that we tend to become quite fearful of risks that are dramatically bought to our attention, even if those risks are not at all realistic. This is true when it comes to investing as well as other aspects of our lives.

In investing, as well as in exploring forests where mountain lions might live, it’s foolish to engage in risky behavior. It’s just as foolish to become obsessive about protecting yourself from dangers that are extremely unlikely to come to pass.

Among the scary investing stories that make headlines are plunges in the stock market and CEOs who bring companies to ruin and take employee pension plans with them. Those are genuine risks, but risks that are highly unlikely to affect diversified investors.

The real risks when it comes to investing are less exciting. One of the biggest investing risks is to try to get rich in a hurry by trading in individual stocks. Another is to keep your money in superficially safe investments such as CDs, which actually lose purchasing power because of inflation.

Perhaps the biggest risk in investing, however, is one we don’t think of as a risk at all. That is being either so fearful or such a procrastinator that you don’t invest your money at all. Now that is a risk worth losing some sleep over.