It's actually quite hard to summarize my experiences blogging about finance. Certainly I think I've learned a lot about myself as a money manager, what I should invest next, how I can save to invest. There are a lot of life lessons in seeing how one functions, and I've realized, quite frankly, I'm a bit sqeamish when spending money. I can live with that.
We're still in the process of getting our life insurance taken care of. Funny or not, this is one of those major things I had to do to get my finances straight. Because part of investing is preparing for the future, and life insurance does that. Just this week we had a home nurse come and check our weights, heights, blood, urine (urgh), etc. and infinitum, to make sure we don't smoke, don't overdrink, don't drug, don't have HIV or diabetes or any of those other million risk factors that will cause our insurance company to lose out on their investment in us. It's kinda creepy to think this much about the potentialities of death when the whole idea of investing is to prepare for a comfortable, financially secure future. There's a whole lot more to this than just the stock market.
So what have I learned? I've also learned that being financially smart means doing a lot of little things in preparation for the glory days of retirement, and it also means giving up some of the frivilous things now. I'll pay off my car next March and then drive it, literally, until it implodes, hopefully in 4 or 5 more years. We'll keep updating this fixer-upper to add value to our property. And I won't skydive, because that makes my life insurance null and void if I die from it. And who wants that?
As an investor, I found out that I'm moderately risky, like to watch money grow, and I can do it based on dollar-cost averaging. Maybe that's investing in moderation, but because I don't make a killing as a teacher, so what? It's something. My goal has been to highlight my assets, protect them, and grow them, while marking down debt like mortgage and student loans. It'll take time, and that is probably the one thing I find frustrating the most. It takes time to both grow money and get rid of debt. For those of us who are impatient, this can be excruiating, like Chinese water torture. But I think the reward is worth the wait, right?
1 comment:
Hi Julie,
I would like to thank you again for a great class and to tell you that I posted the paper as a blog on my page though it completly took it out of mla format. Also, I posted another blog tonight, even though the class is over I wouldn't mind at all if you could every once in a while check on my blogs and give me pointers of dos and donts while I blog. Thank you again and have a great summer!
-Paul Whalen
Post a Comment