Reality Check: Why I haven’t started investing yet
November 19, 2007
Could it be, I have no unclaimed cash? Why, yes! Duh! Typical, I get all excited about the idea of expanding my financial horizons, broadening my exposure to different investment and saving options, and exploring the great NASDAQ. And forget that I’ve not a penny to put in place of my mouth.
Silly girl. One great reason I shouldn’t be redirecting my cash: the plan to buy a rental property next summer with my friend.
Another great reason: my e-fund’s still not up to par yet.
Another: I still haven’t a clue what’s going on in the stock market, beyond the basics. In fact, I might not really grasp the basics thoroughly, either.
Instead of becoming discouraged, this is what I’ll do.
1. Research the brokerages. Scottrade, Ameritrade, Charles Schwab, etc. Compare and contrast their products, services and fees. Decide on a brokerage by Christmas. Research and pick a couple of stocks I like.
2. Clear up my financial messiness: round up the credit cards from last year’s AOR, transfer the credit limits to the cards I plan to keep and cancel the losers. Decide if I want to pay off the BroDucky fiasco 0% BT two months early so that I can take advantage of my last 0% BT for about 8 months.
3. Call in the $5000 personal loan from a family friend and deposit that into my savings. It’s convoluted, but the end result means that the money will now be working for me, and not for my dad.
4. Sell the truck. Maybe I will take the “easy” way out and use a car selling service. Carmax, maybe? Things are sufficiently busy and complicated that I don’t relish the idea of investing a lot of time, but neither do I want to lose a lot of money selling that way. If they’ll pay $10k, then I’ll just do it.
5. If I get a good Christmas bonus, set aside $1000 for investing. That’s assuming the brokerage I pick doesn’t have a higher minimum balance.
You have plenty of invesments! You’ve told us all about your retirement accounts, don’t you research what goes into those?
~then things~ I can certainly spend more time researching the allocations in my retirement accounts, but I’d like to become more active in the stock market with non-retirement investments. Of course, whatever I learn can be applied to the retirement funds as well, but in the meantime, I don’t want to experiment with them as they’re doing ok.
I DO need to figure out what to invest my Rollover IRA in, though.
i sold my own car once. used craig’s list. it worked out well and i got more than i would have gotten for a trade-in.