by The Investor
on December 4, 2009
Reader Len Penzo raised a very good point in response to my post about how your investing might change if you knew when you’d die:
I notice you have taken the perspective of a single man with no kids. But what if you have a family, Investor? That changes the calculus yet again!
For example, if I was single with no kids and knew I had two months to live – or five years, for that matter – then I would make sure the last penny of my savings would be used to pay the mortician who cremates me.
Ah, but with a wife and kids, those thought equations are turned upside down.
I wrote the original post to provoke thought, rather than to cover all the eventualities, but I decided Len’s point was such a good one that it deserved a specific follow-up.
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by The Investor
on December 4, 2009
I think it was the third bottle of fizzy water she’d asked the waiter for that did it. But perhaps it was the fourth. Contrary to her protestations, I wasn’t counting.
Either way, I complained that we were spending a fortune on what’s normally free – and that we weren’t even getting good value for money, since with all that air in the bottled bubbles we were getting less water, too.
That last bit was a joke, but she didn’t see the funny side. In fact, my girlfriend informed me that I cared too much about money, and that most ‘normal’ people wouldn’t think twice about buying a third/fourth bottle of the free stuff.
“What if you got hit by a bus tomorrow,” my girlfriend said, having not had time to work up something more original. “What good would saving £2 on a bottle of water be then?”
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by The Investor
on December 2, 2009
I have been roaming around Eastern Europe for nearly two weeks without a consistent Internet connection – and with an aversion to paying scandalous any data roaming charges for my iPhone.
This meant that I only caught snippets about the Dubai World debt suspension story that spooked the stock markets.
That’s the bad news. But it’s not really bad news because it just meant I missed:
- A stock market wobble
- Hundreds of thousands of words of speculation, written by journalists and bloggers salivating that the crash was back on (they miss the meltdown)
- The predictions of doom splashed across the Sunday papers – with icons of the Earth in the shape of a bomb with a skyscraper in Dubai for a fuse.
- Any response mumbled by Gordon Brown.
In fact, I only caught the tail-end: the recovery. Party time!
My portfolio didn’t miss out, of course. It went down, and then up, regardless of whether I paid any attention or not.
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by The Investor
on November 29, 2009
My regular Saturday comment followed by this week’s blog and financial site links.
Eagle-eyed readers may have spotted I only wrote one post this week, and also that today’s round-up is 24 hours late.
All true, I admit with shame.
It turns out this rural region of Eastern Europe really is rural. Now I’m back in the capital and a modern, could-be-anywhere hotel – stripped floorboards, floor to ceiling mirrors and furnishings in various shades of brown – I already miss the countryside, with locals walking their cows to pasture and pressing their bad homemade wine upon you.
It’s like the 1950s, in 2009.
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