Digging up and dusting off this good ole journal for an update.
Money: Meh and Sigh
So in my usual unintentionally unconventional way, I've managed to be one of the few people who actually lost money going the ERE route.
I've always been naturally frugal, with no particular overarching plan but a few loose ideas along the lines of "Why not just keep expenses at the student-level after graduating", and "if I save half my money, I'll only have to work half the time".
Of course this meant reasonably-sized savings, which the bank would then occasionally badger me to move into one of their investment fonds. I knew this was an expensive solution for investing, but, what the meh, it's just money, and it's really boring.
Reading this forum finally gave me the motivation to reclaim my money from the clammy claws of the bank, and invest them on my own.... except I sorta stalled after step one, and am now keeping almost all* my funds in plain cash.. so yes, I've missed the gains from this crazy stock bull market.
Still, it's been interesting and rewarding to read about financial markets, investing etc. If I just ignore my private finances and focus on the system itself my interest increases dramatically.
Previously, I might look at e.g. the granite curb stones while walking somewhere, and marvel at how more than a billion years ago, this rock was formed from magma deep in the earth, then slowly pushed to the surface. Then sometime in very recent history some odd-looking primates started to break and carve pieces of this rock, sweating and toiling. Others would move them out, in still wider areas, to construct homes, roads, bridges, and still more complex buildings. Then it's machines breaking the rock and distributing it across the globe, while near-instant electronic communication determines its destination and purpose.
Every little thing around us carries a whole history of the world that brought it into existence.
Now I'm adding the financial perspective on top of this network of history and interactions. It just fascinates me how our entire human culture is enmeshed in an increasingly convoluted system moving around different abstractions of "You owe me a favour".
OK, this update has turned into completely off-tangent rambling**, so I'd better just stop here.
tl;dr: I'm OK at saving, but suck at investing. The world is a strange place.
* "All" here meaning the money I control myself. A good portion of my pay automagically gets sent to my pension fund each month. That's the commie Danish nanny state ensuring dumbniks like meself will have something to live off in old age.
** Don't blame me, every self-respecting supervillain has a propensity for soliloquies
