Can I tell you a secret? Money management is kind of boring once you put a lot of things on autopilot. I know that automatically investing in my ROTH, and automatically investing in my 401k is the right thing to do but it just isn’t sexy. The money just goes in every two weeks and automatically buys a couple index funds. No adrenaline. No euphoria. I could really go for a dotcom spike. Maybe day trade ebay or google a little. That might get the blood flowing.
Of course I won’t. I’m too damn conservative to start buying and selling individual stocks on a daily basis. I have branched out a bit and bought an individual stock a couple weeks ago. Now I have a couple individual stocks in my portfolio. Too bad one of them is MSFT and I’m underwater on it. I think I bought it at it’s near peak and then rode it down. I’m just going to take their “chump change” dividends for awhile and try to ride it back up. I’m theorizing a bit that with the release of Vista and a couple other products, their revenues might go up enough to drive the stock north a bit. Who knows.
So, here I sit. I could spend time researching some stocks tonight. The only problem with that idea is that I don’t know what to look for, and even if I did, I’d probably be too lazy to actually do it. Luckily there is such a thing as dollar cost averaging in index funds. It’s a great combination for a lazy, uninformed guy like me.
One other item of note is that we bought a new digital camera today. We had a really nice Sony camera but it died. Judging by all the knicks and chunks out of the case, I’d guess that it got dropped a few times either by my wife or my two year old daughter, who wasn’t supposed to be touching it in the first place. Since I know I have never dropped it, it had to have been one of them, or a combination of both. Anyway, we’ve been talking/dreading buying a new one. We spent $300 on the last one and really didn’t want to shell out that much for another since it could very well meet the same fate as our broken one.
So, what do you do when you don’t want to shell out a ton of money for a camera but you also want decent pictures/videos out of it? Well, you head over to Fatwallet, of course. I checked in their forums and saw that Officemax had a clearance Sony camera that used to retail for $179 (so it’s not exactly their flagship model) for only $99 (after instant $50 off). The other tip was that Office Depot had a coupon on their site for $20 off any order over $100. Well, I printed them all out and sent my wife to the store (while I went off to work) to see if they had one in stock and if they would honor another store’s coupon. They did. Somehow we got this camera for $77. It’s a 4 megapixel and does mpeg videos as well. Not bad.
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Nice job! I had no idea you could find such a deal even today. Here I am sending my poor friends to buy the Canon SD400 ($300).
As for your gripe on auto-pilot being boring. I hear you! I feel the same way. The only thing we can do is wait… Damnit. It almost is more appealing to figure it all out again.
Investing boring?….um, yeah, you hit the nail on the head!
That’s the main reason I joined the personal finance blog-o-sphere…to help find more ideas on investing and at the same time commiserate with others in the same boat…
Keep it up, you’re not alone! :)
I have the same issues going through autopilot. My slump happens most of the time around mid month where everything is in order and paid. I try to work through it though.
I have a kodak z740 and paid a bundle for it, so I have it in a high place so the kids can’t touch it :P
The first electronic casualty in our household was my cellphone, which one day stopped dialing “0” — and you’d be amazed how often you need that number. Heh. Turns out little teether had been chewing on it. Second was the Tivo remote, certain buttons stopped working, and for the same reason. Why she was drawn to electronic devices and would not chew on anything that was an actual, you know, teether, I do not know. But I’m glad that stage is over.
Of course, once that stage was over and she was even more mobile and curious, she dropped the camera.
I feel your pain.
I’m with you one this one – automatic investing can be quite boring, but I guess it’s supposed to be that way. Maybe to make things a little more intersting you could invest a small amount in a more speculative stock and get excited seeing how it pans out. I’ve done that a few times and found it to be quite enjoyable. I saved up money to buy a TV about a year ago but ended up getting a pretty good one from a friend and was left with the money I saved. I invested it in this biotech company that I found and made 3% off of it on an earnings report. Not a great amount of money, but it was fun researching it and it was money that wouldn’t have mattered to me too much if I had lost it all!
Wow, I was just about ready to put up a similiar post! I too get “bored” with my finances from time to time. Having all my bills ready to be paid, no cc payments to make, auto drafts for retirement. I guess what keeps me interested is the small amout of “mad” money I allow myself to play with during the month. Perhaps you SHOUL consider being a bit wild with just a bit of money each week. Just a thought. Keep up the great work.
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Yep. I’m actually playing around with a couple thousand and trying my hand at value investing. It’s been challenging to go against the hype machine and buying stocks that are out of favor. My first experience is going well so far. I’m up about 10% on a stock that dropped over 50% in the last 6 months.
I don’t find stocks boring at all. This month there hasn’t been a day where the daily change in my portfolio wasn’t at least four digits (both up and down, but I’m proud to say more up than down).
It’s at the point where the money I put every month into my brokerage pales in comparison to the daily change from the fluctuations in the market.