Can I tell you a secret? Money management is kind of boring once you put a lot of things on autopilot. I know that automatically investing in my ROTH, and automatically investing in my 401k is the right thing to do but it just isn’t sexy. The money just goes in every two weeks and automatically buys a couple index funds. No adrenaline. No euphoria. I could really go for a dotcom spike. Maybe day trade ebay or google a little. That might get the blood flowing.
Of course I won’t. I’m too damn conservative to start buying and selling individual stocks on a daily basis. I have branched out a bit and bought an individual stock a couple weeks ago. Now I have a couple individual stocks in my portfolio. Too bad one of them is MSFT and I’m underwater on it. I think I bought it at it’s near peak and then rode it down. I’m just going to take their “chump change” dividends for awhile and try to ride it back up. I’m theorizing a bit that with the release of Vista and a couple other products, their revenues might go up enough to drive the stock north a bit. Who knows.
So, here I sit. I could spend time researching some stocks tonight. The only problem with that idea is that I don’t know what to look for, and even if I did, I’d probably be too lazy to actually do it. Luckily there is such a thing as dollar cost averaging in index funds. It’s a great combination for a lazy, uninformed guy like me.
One other item of note is that we bought a new digital camera today. We had a really nice Sony camera but it died. Judging by all the knicks and chunks out of the case, I’d guess that it got dropped a few times either by my wife or my two year old daughter, who wasn’t supposed to be touching it in the first place. Since I know I have never dropped it, it had to have been one of them, or a combination of both. Anyway, we’ve been talking/dreading buying a new one. We spent $300 on the last one and really didn’t want to shell out that much for another since it could very well meet the same fate as our broken one.
So, what do you do when you don’t want to shell out a ton of money for a camera but you also want decent pictures/videos out of it? Well, you head over to Fatwallet, of course. I checked in their forums and saw that Officemax had a clearance Sony camera that used to retail for $179 (so it’s not exactly their flagship model) for only $99 (after instant $50 off). The other tip was that Office Depot had a coupon on their site for $20 off any order over $100. Well, I printed them all out and sent my wife to the store (while I went off to work) to see if they had one in stock and if they would honor another store’s coupon. They did. Somehow we got this camera for $77. It’s a 4 megapixel and does mpeg videos as well. Not bad.
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