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3 . 1 9 . 0 9 Moving this journal over to the webomatica site. Ides of March, just got through some of my taxes for 2008. In many ways its been a sign of getting older in that filing has gotten more complicated as opposed to years past. It seems as the income slowly creeps upward there are additional forms to fill out, calculations to double check, and accepting the fact that some deductions and credits simply don’t apply anymore. In a strange way I actually enjoy the number crunching part of it, Hana jokes that maybe I should’ve considered accounting instead of law. The other part of the madness this time around is the nagging issue of the market uncertainty the world has been seeing, and the begging question of how to plan for savings and retirement account contributions with all the market volatility. Personal finance and overall economic stability has been a major distraction for much of the last 6 months now. In every angle of analysis I come to the conclusion that we’re in decent shape, and could weather a storm or two, should something happen. However there is that uncertainty of not being fully prepared for the possible sudden downturn, or major event that turns everything upside down, like a black swan event or something. I’ve read a bit about personal risk tolerances when it comes to finances, and I’m relatively risk adverse in many aspects. This could be reflected why I’ve decided to work on my law degree part-time, while working full time, why I purposefully minimized the amount of student loan debt I took on over the past four years, and the fact that I’ve made every effort to live well below my means, even paying off interest and principal while still in school. Still I worry that even with all the preparations, it might not be enough to survive sometime that comes along and blindsides us. One conclusion that I’ve come to is that there is really no such thing as a safe asset class, given this uncertain environment, and the unprecedented steps that the government is doing, you can’t pump in Trillions of dollars one way or another without having some kind of unintended consequences, any of which could be disaster to the overall market confidence. I hear people talking about this environment as being the time to buy, with many blue chip stocks at historic lows, and housing prices plummeting, mortgage rates also very low, especially for those with good credit. The thing is that all of this stuff is really a form of legalized gambling, and that there is always a form of risk here and there, it all depends on how much you can first of all afford, and can stomach. There’s also this concept that paper price asset reflects an actual value of a stock, regardless of the production power it may have in the form of the company’s profitability, or fiscal health. Who cares how much the stock price is relative to the price you purchased it if it doesn’t produce any income as dividends? After all the only way you can profit from a surge in a stock price is to sell it, and then get whacked with the capital gains taxes. By this rationale, real estate at any price in general is not an investment at all, its just a form of shelter. I think that the sooner people start to recognize these things, maybe it’ll mark the beginning of the the long road to recovery and stabilization. Meanwhile in the other March Madness, Wisconsin got in at a low end, 12-seed in the Eastern Division, up against a surging Florida State, hopefully it won’t be a mirror of the bowl game this past football season. If Bucky can pull off the upset, then they’ll probably have to face a tough road, likely facing Xavier and then Pitt. Who knows, typically Wisconsin does better when no one is expecting them to go anywhere. The final four bid from a few years back was an example of that. I’ve filled out a bracket or two, just for fun, been pretty distracted this year so I can’t say that I know much about the strength of picks. |