I don't tend to think of myself as an "adult" most of the time, but today I had a moment where that overwhelming sense of personal responsibility really hit home in an empowering but sobering way.
Me and the little wife love video games. We love our personal computers. We both own laptops - mine's going on four years old, and I intend to squeeze a few more years out of it with lightweight Linux distros, but it's not really good for games anymore. We talked about what we would rather get - an HDTV, or a desktop computer we'd build ourselves. We settled on the desktop, reasoning we could use a decent monitor for our HD gaming if we so desired.
We've been planning this for a long, long time. I've put off buying the Mass Effects, Bethesda games, Dragon Age.... all because I intended to get them once I build a desktop.
Today I was reading through a book on financials, and I looked up at my wife and I said,
"What would you think if I said we should just take the desktop money and buy stock in a big bank or something?"
She agreed that this was the better idea.
We both come from backgrounds of high income combined with financial turmoil due to money mismanagement so that we've never really lived like our families' incomes would have suggested. This has given a tendency toward saving, a belief in the need to invest in our financial security. The idea of taking five hundnred dollars a pop and buying stock in some big, stable, old corporations is comforting, especially when you opt into those programs where dividends paid to you get re-invested into buying more shares. We're in our early (early) twenties, but this could be the first big serious step we have toward investing in retirement.
It's the right decision. I know it is.
But dammit, that desktop was gonna be awesome.
Oh well. Time to buy the 360 version of Mass Effect, I guess...
