will this be known as the big regret of 2008?

so the economy is not doing well. duh. luckily i have good job security, but i am still making efforts to be better about saving. i have started tracking all of my purchases this month in an effort to be more conscious of where my money of going and where i can trim some of the more frivolous spending. so far so good. i had made a pact with dave to not eat out at all during the week and to not eat fast food at all during november. i am going strong so far...dave failed in less than 12 hours. knowing that whenever i buy something i have to write it down, makes me hesitant to buy dumb random stuff that i would usually buy...like games on itunes or some random book when i have like 3 other unread books at home. it's almost like a game or personal challenge where if i write $0 spent for the day, then i win. hopefully when i add all of this stuff along with mortgage, utilities, gym and other recurring charges, i will be spending less than i earn.

ok, back to the country's economy and my embarrassing and extreme lack of understanding how it works. i have never made much of an effort to understand how investing and the economy works. thinking about it usually made my head hurt. buy low, sell high is about the extent of my understanding. my dad, who is pretty knowledgeable about this sort of stuff, recently convinced me to start investing beyond my normal 401k. he said something along the lines of "when people are greedy, you should be scared, but when people are scared....you should be..." i cut him off, yelling "greedy!!!!", not fully understanding why, but i eagerly made an educated guess about where the advise was going. luckily i was right in anticipating what he was going to say and i guess it made some sense to me. a lot of very solid companies that have had a long track record and will be around for a long time have stocks that are valued very low. now is the time to jump in and grab some shares of google while it is at half of the value it was at last year...or so i sort of understand it. i mean they can't get much lower, right? if the answer is they can get much lower, than i would rather not know.

so now i have begun to read and understand a little bit more about how investing works. i set up an investing account and stuck a bunch of money in it. i have seeked the advice of some friends who know more about this than i do. i realize that this is essentially gambling and thus very likely something that i could become obsessed/addicted to. so any day now, i will take the plunge and pick some stocks that will hopefully rebound in the coming months. i am currently looking at google, cvs, ge, apple, garmin, bed, bath and beyond and microsoft. hopefully all goes well and this time next year i am kickin it scrooge mcduck style and not wearing a barrel held up with suspenders.





is this asking for too much?