Hey everyone, just a weird little thing I noticed happened when I looked at my account today that I thought was some good food for badass thoughts. This is more silly than badass but it really made me think. It’s semi-badass at best but I wanted to share it anyway just because it made me ponder if I shouldn’t do something differently.
I keep a pretty decent budget, I have about 30ish categories, it seems to be the magic number for me because if I get much more detailed I’m disinclined to track my spending because it takes too much time, but it’s still detailed enough I can go back and review things and learn and tweak YMOYL style etc.
Anyway January of 2013, as I write this in December 2013, I began to notice that sometimes at the end of the month I’d have small amounts “leftover” here and there.
This is, in my speculation, because I tend to set my budget categories for typical or sometimes worst case scenarios just for simplicity’s sake. I like not worrying and all.
But this has the side effect of some months I don’t spend it all in a given category. It’s never a huge amount, at least not any more as I keep tightening the budget and getting it closer and closer.
I noticed in prior years I was just sweeping this money up, usually into my “blow” money. But since I’ve gradually been decreasing my “blow” money for several years since it doesn’t really make me nearly as happy as it used to, I’ve been trying to be a little more mindful of that category.
So I piled it all up and realized, just by pure luck, it was enough to buy one share of this ETF I had on my other browser tab. It’s a commission free ETF on my brokerage account, so I said instead of buying Stuff I’m going to speculate wildly in the stock market with this money. XD
Well in February, it happened again. I resolved it the same way. At that point, I realized I wasn’t going to have “leftovers” every month but I wanted to, as a goof, see how many shares of this ETF I might buy in 2013 using this method. I thought I’d average one every quarter.
I now have 14 shares of this ETF. I really didn’t realize I had so many I thought maybe I had 9. Granted it’s only about $840, but still, that’s $840 from what seems like thin air!
What happened was I’ve become so obsessed with being able to buy a share of this ETF every month, I’ve been subconsciously avoiding spending on other things. I began to lust after this ETF like I used to lust after DVDs or whatever pile of crap it was that week, playing stupid games in my head with how big would the dividend be next time if only I blah blah blah.
Anyway I tweaked my budget and increased my pre tax savings by approximately that much, which SHOULD make it impossible to have so much leftover money I can keep doing this.
And I realize I should sell this ETF and fold the proceeds into my regular asset allocation. It’s just a weird little investment I made that doesn’t really fit my overall style/strategy.
But you know what? I think I’m going to keep playing this silly little game until I get bored of it. I want to see if I can keep it going with the smaller, tighter budget. I just want to see how silly this can get.
