a little spending and a lot of saving :)

Well, I did it – last night, after much deliberation, I finally went ahead and bought the laptop I posted about. And – thanks to a free trial of Amazon Prime membership, it will be here tomorrow!! I am pretty excited about a new toy ;)

To compensate for the relatively expensive (in my budget) purchase, I also pushed myself to accomplish one of my twenty-ten goals: I opened a Roth IRA account and transferred money over. It’s something I’ve meant to do for awhile, knowing that it’s important to have a retirement account – but for some reason, it always seemed really complicated. I can handle some pretty complex math, but I don’t do super well with complicated financial stuff. Budgets - sure, just make a pretty excel spreadsheet. No-load mutual funds vs. ETFs - huh?? In talking to my girl friends, it seems I am not alone. These friends are also highly intelligent with professional degrees, but there is something about investment jargon that makes it like a foreign language to us.


I get annoyed a stereotypes that portray women as flighty and financially incompetent, spending lots of money on frivolous items without any awareness of their financial situation (à la Shopaholic – I like lots of “chick lit”, but these ones bugged me!). I have never been irresponsible with money; I do like to track my expenses and make sure I save money. But investments are a different story. What is it about investing that is so unappealing to women? The risk aspect is likely one reason – this was voiced by a bunch of my friends over a recent discussion about stocks; they are just worried about losing their hard-earned money. Additionally, investing is complicated, requiring lots of reading on the subject in order to begin to understand it well – which is necessary if you want to actually be successful and not lose all your money. For me personally, there is also something that is fundamentally boring about the entire subject, which prevents me from digging into the nitty-gritty. It’s like the difference I experienced between undergrad and grad school. In undergrad, I encountered lots of really complex material that I had to learn for classes – some was interesting; some was boring, but I was able to struggle through and learn it. Then in graduate school, my thesis topic involved a lot of advanced linear algebra, a subject I had little background in. It was hard, and boring. There also were no good classes to teach me the things I needed; instead, my advisor gave me a textbook and told me to read it. Um... right. It took me forever to actually figure out what I needed to learn, because it was 1) hard; 2) boring; and 3) had to be all self-taught. Investment principals seem like this to me, and therefore, I struggle with understanding – and frequently don’t bother to try.

I’m fortunate in that I have my own personal tutor though, since my husband has a big interest in the stock market and investing. He frequently talks to me about different techniques and asks my opinion, and I try my best to understand what he is talking about :) Sometimes it seems like I need him to explain this stuff twenty times before I actually catch on to what it means. Again, I don’t know why – just seems like a missing loop in my brain that has trouble making the connections. But luckily he is patient :)

For the IRA account, I sat attempting to navigate through some complicated and non-user friendly webpages with way too many technical terms for awhile, and got frustrated. Then I decided to use my resources to the best of my abilities, so I asked my husband. He explained the difference between mutual funds and ETFs, and pointed me towards Tradeking, an online site that has some of the cheapest rates for transaction fees. Thanks honey! If you want to know more details about this stuff - I don’t consider myself a good source of this info, since I’m clearly not an expert. But a couple years ago Suze Orman had a free download of her book Women and Money, which I did read. It has a lot of the basics, and discusses some issues specific to women. Or, if you happen to know a friend or family member with lots of investment experience, you could do what I did and ask for a personal lesson.

So now I have my very own retirement account, ready to grow my money. And tomorrow I should have a new laptop, and I’ll be ready to crank out blog posts every day! Well… maybe, if a new laptop somehow adds an extra 3 - 4 hours to each day ;)