It’s Hard to Sit Still in this Economy

I’m such a dunce.  I have been spending way too much time thinking of things to spend money on these days.  I’ve dealt with at least 3 bouts of car lust over the past couple months and have been thinking about home improvement projects too.  Will someone please duct tape me to a chair to bring things under control?

I’m sure a psychologist could help me sort out my issues but I don’t think I’m going to take it to that extreme.  It’s frankly quite embarrassing that I have been spending so much time thinking about what to spend money on.  It’s almost like there’s an invisible force trying to keep me from saving.  I really wish I had more self control.  The good news is that we are still practicing standard personal finance rules by paying ourselves first.  We are putting away roughly $30,000 a year in our 401K’s and are keeping our debt levels at zero (other than the mortgage on our primary house).  I guess that’s why I keep finding my mind drifting towards “living a little” now.

It really all comes down to a couple things.  The first is that I’ve never been able to get a grasp on how much money we should be saving.  I know what our long term goals are for retirement and we are safely saving towards those goals.  The thing we really don’t have a good handle on is what do we do after those goals are met?  We could definitely save for the sake of saving.  I’ve really not spent as much time and money on investing outside of IRA type shelters and I know having a large chunk of cash in retirement that isn’t taxable would be a smart move.  That’s probably the single biggest thing hanging over my head.

The second thing that plays in to our situation is that I do want to enjoy the things that we can afford now, but I’m also very conscious of not wanting to be a materialistic consumer.  It’s that whole thing about conspicuous consumption.  I’ve mentioned before how I like the idea of the “100 things movement”, but then I find myself thinking about more crap that I could buy.  It’s almost like I have a split personality.  Damn brain!

And the one last thing that I think is contributing to all these crazy thoughts is that I’m somewhat bored.  Meeting our financial goals and having everything on autopilot can be pretty damned mind numbing.  While I’ve been thinking about all those things that I “could” buy, I’ve also been thinking about how we can put our excess income to work for us.  Sure, the market is one angle, but with all the 401K contributions we are making, I feel like that’s relatively  covered.  I’ve also been thinking about getting in to the property rental business.  (Which I’ve talked about before as well).  The price of houses in our area are getting very affordable to the point that we could just about buy one with a large down payment.  With a little work, we could have that property being paid for by someone else on a monthly basis.  We still may go down that road at some point and I think that’s what is helping me continue our march to increase our savings account balances.  Anyway, this was really kind of a stream of consciousness blog post where I just spilled all the random things going on inside my head.  All in all, we are very blessed and I need to just remember that when I’m fretting about what financial decisions to make.