So I hit my target savings rate. Then I maxed out the 401k. Then I started working on the Roth IRA. Then I started working on my giving fund, the G-IRA. Then I finally waded through the garbage dump of red tape required to invest some of my HSA. But then what? And then what after that?
I log into my Vanguard account for the lulz. Up, down. Up, down. It used to be fun to see the value of my investments. But just like Pavlov’s dogs, I still log into the account even though I know it doesn’t matter, even though it’s hella boring. Ooh, maybe something exciting today? Nope. There never is.
The truth is that money is not very fascinating. I enjoy personal finance and this past year has been exciting as I’ve pushed, prodded, and challenged myself on the path to the venerable 50% savings rate. But once you hit that goal, whatever yours may be, who cares? You’ll either hoard your scraps beyond that, you’ll throw it out and feel guilty, or maybe you’ll just spend it and not care. Who knows? Really it doesn’t matter, no matter how hard I try to believe otherwise.
The only thing for me to be financially excited about is the fact that I’m one paycheck away from from my first big G-IRA “distribution”. That’s cool, but consequently there’s really no movement in my own savings. Maybe I can cash out the $80 worth of coins in my coin bank and use that to round out my IRA? Sure. Woohoo. Otherwise it’s the longue durée from here, and for years to come. January will reset the clock on 401k and IRA contributions, with a estimated limit increase for IRAs, but that’s then and this is now.
I just feel like calling attention to this. There’s a lot of great things about saving lots of money, but ultimately you do get used to it and it stops feeling special.
I’ve contemplated having a budget line-item for anime. I’m not even kidding you. Just once a month, pick something completely new. There’s probably a service you can subscribe to for that, but I like hard copies. My brain is slowly toying with the idea of returning to my more artistic endeavors, the stories rattling in my head, the world-building, the general enjoyment I get from writing in general. How some of the key pieces to my E.S. Asher Lego project are falling together. My not-too-sucky drawing skills even came out a few weeks ago on my roommates’ refrigerator white board.
I miss economic theory. I have a notebook at home that I once used for recording my odd and sometimes disjointed pet economic theories. Some of them I thought were really good, but the only one I have included in this blog was one on the initial, inherent, and extended costs of things, very likely subconsciously lifted from something I read in the past. The others are all in there somewhere. I saw a few books on minimum wage that may be fun to read, and not those crappy political types of books you find all over the place, like books that really investigate the issue. I miss that.
On the list of subjects I’d like to explore in this blog is the psychology of money. It’s one thing to tell people to stop pissing their money away, it’s another thing to understand why humanity is so inclined to piss their money away in the first place. But even though there will always be something to say about money, I’m pretty interested in talking about other things, too.