WARNING: Prepare yourself for a seriously “first world problem” piece of whininess.
I’m bored 🙂 . The key to long term investing success is to set it and forget it: put your money in the market and let it ride. Since we are entering a new year I still had things to optimize: how much should I try to spend so I can save the maximum amount with my new salary? Would I get my bonus? If so, how would that increase my savings rate? How much of my budget should I allocate to vacations? Should I travel hack more of my flights? Sadly all of that has come to an end. I’ve solved them all and booked all my flights until March 2018. Now I seem to just be waiting for the end of each month so I can budget my money, move it into my investments and update my spreadsheets. This process sadly only takes a few minutes. Then I’m back to waiting.
I need to reframe my thoughts on this. I know that. Previously I had been able to amuse myself and nerd out by helping other people with their money. Most recently I helped my Mom. She’s going to move all of her investments to Vanguard, which is a huge win! They’re going to save tens of thousands of dollars a year by not overpaying their current advisor and not paying insane sales loads or expense ratios. That made me really happy, but when the research was done and I gave her a plan I went back to waiting.
This is obviously a train of consciousness post – I’m trying to figure out a solution while writing this. Maybe I should try and help more people? It’s a sensitive subject though (money in America) and I like people to come to me when they’re ready – like my Mom. I told her how much she was losing to fees each year about two years ago. I thought it would light a fire under her because she’s retired and needs that money for her fancy vacations 🙂 but it didn’t. She didn’t even want to hear it. She also said she didn’t want to learn something new (I assured her it’s easy) and didn’t want to change companies (also simple in today’s tech world) and thought all of it sounded complicated (it’s not). So I let it go and a few years later here she is. I don’t want to push anyone to ask for my help. It’s also possible the kind of money help they want or need isn’t something I specialize in. I think the best solution right now is to just let it go. Keep reading about economics and finance and investing and be ok with not ‘producing’ something myself. I have this blog, I have my advisor position at that financial website and I have random opportunities to talk about investing. That will have to be enough for now.