Day 91

My financial adviser had some new ideas for me today. To tell you the truth, not a one of them made any sense. When I first started earning enough money to consider investing some of it, I was fairly confident that the money I put away would actually grow. Back then, you could buy a house with some degree of certainty that it would be worth more in five years than you paid for it. If you didn't trust the stock market, you could buy Treasury Bills that earned 11% a year. Even a plain vanilla Certificate of Deposit at your neighborhood bank offered 8% interest.  I used to buy stocks in solid companies and then forgot about them for years at a time, fully expecting both dividends and share prices to increase.

What a difference a financial crisis makes. Today, investing is a minefield. The minute you think bonds are a good bet, countries like Greece go bankrupt. Stocks can drop 10% in a single day on mere rumors. Municipal Bonds? Yeah right. The entire state of California is going under. My adviser likes the futures market. I just don't get it. Nobody really knows what the future is going to bring. When I graduated from college, I was convinced that people would be walking around on Mars by 2010. I never would have dreamed that almost everybody would have computers on their desks more powerful than the one Neil Armstrong took to the moon, but only use them to watch YouTube videos. Who could have predicted that shows like The Real Housewives of Orange County would become huge hits, or that there would be entire channels like HGTV, filled with nothing but shows about real estate.

The future is a mystery to me. That's probably a good thing too. Who really wants to know the future anyway? Especially if it might involve picking up aluminum cans on the side of the road to supplement your social security.

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