January 16th, 2007
Never before, never again (well, hopefully not)
In this age of screencaps and the fraction of time it takes to assemble plausible proof of status, you may have understandable doubt about the validity of the image above, but we both know how little money means to me at this point in my life (look at where I’m living). So I have no obvious reason to fabricate such a statement, aside from perhaps giving cause for my family to sleep a little easier at night. Since they, however, are the source of the above figure, though, that too, is debunked.
When I was very young, I received some shares in a variety of Virginia regional banks from my grandfather. Those funds, while nothing to sneeze at, were not capable of any life-altering changes, but time rolls onward and bigger fish/banks eat little fish/banks as the market goes up.
Aside from a few shares for the next tax year, I sold virtually all of my investments and now have a five-digit sum in my bank account. It will be there, happy with my other paltry earnings, and earn about a dollar in interest from BoA, before disappearing quickly to strike down my stupid Citibankl 8.75% APR loan with furious anger. It dawned on me last autumn that this stock is most certainly generating less per year than I am paying in interest on my loans, so liquidating it was an easy choice to make. Unfortunately this only quashes half of the debt I generated in graduate school, but it’ll save me at least 2500 dollars a year (I was currently on track to pay it back over the next twelve to fifteen years).
Hopefully this won’t be the last time I have more than ten thousand dollars in my possession, but with the way things are in Japan, it’s going to be a while. Thank the good Lord for birth control.
