2022-03-18 — Time to Stock Up

Hola, folkses. 🙂

Figured I’d include a picture here, as I’m contemplating cutting the hair off again. We’ll see. You can’t really tell, but it’s long enough to go almost to the tip of my nose. I like having long hair… sometimes. And sometimes I don’t. 🙃

Anyway, yes, I took the day off today nearly completely (rainy and cold). I did very little business stuff at all in fact–at least, not NWA Mobile Auto Services business stuff.

Still, I worked a little, but mostly it’s just been another hard day, and in some ways, a big shift day as well.

The day: I slept in a little bit, getting up after 8, I believe. Then I had someone come to look at my bulldozer. It was actually a guy who’d run an equipment rental business for 35 years, and after looking at my dozer and not wanting it, his advice to me about my plan to run a rental company was simple–don’t do it. And if I do choose to rent the equipment out, he said expect high insurance costs (he paid about $28k/year for insurance). And of course the equipment gets beat up because the people who rent it don’t care about it, and you risk lawsuits, etc.

He had someone who spent the day drinking while using the equipment do something he shouldn’t and end up with the equipment on top of him, causing severe injury, and he sued and won a million dollars.

So that has me rethinking things a bit.

Well… a lot.

I’ve been looking at housing, land, stocks, etc. I need to diversify–badly. Want to hedge against this economic craziness.

Anyway, the gentleman said my dozer wasn’t worth much at all as it is. I’m not surprised. It’s been my second-worst financial decision in my life to this point.

I had a lot of bad financial decisions in 2021 🙃.

Still, those bad 2021 decisions pail in comparison to my worst financial decision that occurred back in 2016 when, after several years of saving every spare penny, not taking vacation time, not buying pretty much anything at all for myself, living in my car or in cheap housing, and just saving saving saving saving for my expected future, that expected future fell apart.

In the wake of everything, I decided to take a year or so off working, and I loaned nearly all my savings to a friend. I expected to get it back relatively quickly, and since I was taking a year off and didn’t need my money during that year, it seemed okay. Though I didn’t really understand exactly what I was doing when I did it (didn’t understand the terms of the loan), and I was pretty scared, I did it anyway.

Well… as I’ve already intimated, nothing worked out–with pretty much anything that year. 2016 was probably the worst year of my life. 2021 was pretty awful for me as well, as you’re all well aware.

Of course, I have a fairly selective memory, so who really knows, right? I remember some things with a memory like a steel trap, and lots of other things with a foggy, gooey, muddy mess of a memory.

Anyway, it’s been six years since I loaned out that money, and I haven’t gotten any of it back. That said, I’m still hopeful the loan will be able to be paid back.

That financial choice ruined me for… years. I’ve finally recovered (meaning that I now have more money than I lost, but no price can be put on the opportunity costs lost. Those have been gargantuan. They put my timing with world events exactly opposite. Had I had that money, I’d have been positioned perfectly for the recent real estate surges, as I’d have had the money do reach my goals and could have executed those goals prior to the big real estate boom.

Whoops. I guess I went on a tangent.

I struggle to not look back and ask the what ifs. I struggle to think that the future could be brighter than what I thought I was working toward. I honestly believe that I won’t ever reach even a semblance of what I’d hoped and prepared for.

Anyway, it’s rough. Having lost my faith in god, I feel a bit purposeless. I have lots of things I’d like to do, but my brain is a big picture brain, so I look at this world and the universe and everything and I go… my life has no meaning in the grand scheme of things, so what’s the point? I’ll live. I’ll die. It’ll be done. The end. So… what’s the point? And I guess the part of me that struggles is the part that says, if I already know what’s coming, let’s just get there already and be done with it. If there’s no point to life, then… why not just be done with it?

I don’t say that suicidally or depressively (though, yes, I’m down today). It’s just how my mind works, the logic (or illogic) of it. If we’re all random accidents on a watery rock in infinite space… there’s no point. Why pretend there is? We’ll die, decompose, and it’ll be over. The end.

It’s hard because inside of me there’s this extremely powerful drive, push, whatever you want to call it, to give my whole life to change the world, make it a better place for everyone, as much as I’m able… as if there were some greater purpose. But… there’s not. I don’t know how to reconcile it all. I don’t know how to exist in a pointless universe. I just want to say, well if the sun is eventually going to explode and kill us all (or whatever global disaster will destroy everything anyway)… gosh, let’s get on with it and just be done.

I just… I don’t really know how to describe the sentiment. I haven’t really sat down to think it through. So this is just raw… brain dump going on right now.

Anyway, another tangent. So I’m down today. I’m lonely. I’m financially discouraged, watching inflation and housing prices once again destroy my savings. But I’m trying to pick myself up and salvage everything as best I can. I just… don’t know what for.

Or something.

Anyway, in an effort to diversify, I funded my Fidelity trading account that I haven’t used I don’t think since I made the bad choice of cashing out my 401k in 2009 when everything was crashing.

Goodness, me and bad financial choices. 😕

Guess I’d better be super careful right now–another major market shift with lots of financial uncertainty, and the last two times that’s happened, I’ve blown it completely.

I’ll buy my first stock tomorrow morning when the market opens up (assuming I wake up in time). I’m just gonna put in $100 to start, and I’ll play around with that and see what happens.

Back when I was a teenager, I came up with an investing strategy, and I tested it out with sort of a mock portfolio, and I absolutely killed it. I’m gonna resurrect that strategy, if I can discipline myself enough to follow it and… we’ll see, eh?

Well, gonna be another busy car day tomorrow. It’s been a really good money week, despite basically only working three days so far.

I find myself fearing leaving fixing cars more and more. It’s like the scene with Bilbo Baggins when he’s about to leave the One Ring. “Now it comes to it, I don’t feel like parting with it…”

I’ve worked so hard to build a very successful business. It’s hard to walk away–it’s scary.

I will, though. I will. Working up to it. Almost there. Been a rough few days, so I haven’t been progressing well on that track.

I feel like I’m rambling.

Talk to me, Goose.

Gonna go to bed. Been writing for over an hour now.

Love you all out there. Even if it’s a pointless world, I’ll try to make it a happier pointless existence for everyone. 🙂

Lift the World.