Tying Lose Ends

From many of the posts I wrote last year that I ended with “I’ll keep you guys updated.”, I haven’t really kept you guys in the loop of my final decisions. Since it’s the new year, I thought I’d tie up the loose ends from last year and start fresh with a new keep-you-updated list. It’s been in the back of my head nagging at me and I think it’s a good time to just round everything up in one post.

I talked about a little money I had left over after buying and selling single stocks for a couple of years. I started with $800.00 and ended up with a little over $1,700.00. I decided that I’m going to focus on paying down debt and not play with investments. Half of it went to hubby’s tuition, quarter of it went to student loan payment, and the last quarter was squandered. Well, some of it was squandered and some of it was used to treat my mom.

I started buying Christmas presents pretty early and I was all happy that I was under budget. However, the bottom line is actually in red. We ended up going out a little more than we anticipated and we spent way more money for my brother in law’s present than planned since he’s birthday is Christmas. But that’s ok. We can recover quickly unlike last year when it took us months to recover from Christmas.

My final decision on LASIK is that I’m not going through with it. It’s too much risk for my condition and as much as I hate wearing contacts and glasses, I’m going to just suck it up and deal with it. I’d rather have bad sight than no sight.

I mentioned about Clarisonic MIA 2 in my favorite things post before I even received it in the mail. Now I can officially say that it is one of my favorite things. Since I started using this, I haven’t had to take a single anti-biotic pill. I do still get pimples here and there, but they go away faster and it doesn’t spread like rash like it used to. I’m so glad I spent the money and my only regret is not buying this earlier.

I asked people to give me some tips on making new friends in my 30’s. Not a single new friend or an acquaintance since the post. I haven’t really tried either, but it’s still on my mind.

When my niece was here for her internship, I was contemplating how best I could talk to her about personal finance. After I wrote that post, she stayed with us for 5 days before leaving DC. But I didn’t have any time alone with her since we had other family members staying with us too. So I ended up just giving her the book with a letter I wrote on the way to the airport. I don’t know if she read it or not. But I hope she doesn’t follow my path of waiting until the 30’s to get my financial act together.

I think this is most of it. I’ll try to be better at “keeping you updated” and not wait a year to do a roundup of it. I guess that’s another new year’s resolution. The list keeps growing~^^

Did you make decisions to all your maybe’s from 2013?

“Play” Money

Let me just be clear and disclose the fact that I have no idea how investing works. I’m just sharing my experience and it’s in no way recommending anybody to do anything that I did. Back in 2008, at the urge of my former boss, I opened a self-manage broker’s account at Scottrade. Back then, I used to never cook and always bought my lunch and dinner and paid minimum for school loans. I didn’t have and shouldn’t have designated whatever money I had as “play” money to throw around, but I did scrape $800.00 and put it into the account. I was too scared to buy anything for the whole $800.00 I had in there, so I started buying cheap single stocks under $5 per share to never total more than $500.00. My definition of research was looking at a graph showing the price history of the last 5 years. I bought and sold a few stocks over the last 5 years and surprisingly, didn’t lose any money.

You want to guess how much I have in there? $1,724.86 is what I have right now. Of course I had to pay taxes on the earnings that’s not reflected in this amount, but compared to what I would’ve made in a savings account, this is really good. Even if I didn’t make as much, it still would’ve befenitted me since I left this money alone during the time of my life when I spent everything in my posession.

But now I’m contemplating whether to leave this money in there and continue to “play” with it or just take it out and pay it toward our student loan. I think it worked so far since I kind of thought of this money as not existing to help me ease the pain in case I lost it. However, since I see that the amount doubled from the initial amount and could really help with the debt pay down, I’m worried about losing this in the future stocks that I end up buying. What do you guys think? Close the account and put the whole thing toward the debt or leave some of it in there or just leave the whole thing alone?

Do you guys have “play” money that you use to dabble in some kind of gambling investments?