Nice message about market drops. I try to adopt this attitude, but I'm a little less emotionally impervious to drops. I find myself feeling "poorer", even though it has no effect on my salary and I always keep at least a year of expense money in short-term securities and we never spend more than 70% of our salaries (and none of the investment income, so far at least). But I cringe when I read posts from people that have invested in companies on margin. We never made a lot of money, but we are pretty comfortable now, and I expect we'll be more so when we retire, and we did it by only spending money on things that we really wanted and saving and investing most of what we made.
I think that the last remark you made was "right on the money". I like having some money, but people that think that it will fix their life are barking up the wrong tree. I don't know any billionaires, but I know a couple of people that are closer than a factor of 10, and several more than have lots more money than I'll ever have, and I don't see that the money has made them happier. If they were happy before, they're happy now, and if not, they're just unhappy in a different way. Being really poor would probably be very unpleasant, but the difference between "I've got a nice little house and some money in the bank" and "I think we'll take the 120 ft yacht" doesn't seem to matter nearly as much as the personalities of the people. |
