When I was in first grade, we “wrote” our autobiographies. We did this by filling out a questionnaire that asked questions such as: “What is your favorite color?” and “How many doors does your house have?”
Not the most scintillating stuff, but my parents nevertheless preserved this sample of my early autobiographical writing for two reasons: (1) I pretended I grew up in Texas when in fact I’d never been there and (2) when it asked “What do you want to be when you grow up?,” I responded: “A milloinaire” [sic].
I remember thinking if I had a million dollars, I’d have the freedom to do pretty much whatever I wanted. But my parents thought this was evidence of a budding taste for the good life, often referring to me as “The Big Spender” (my allowance was 25 cents a week) and joking that I’d somehow developed champagne tastes in a powdered milk family.
What made that funny was we really did drink powdered milk. And eat food from dented cans. Perhaps all this ruined my taste buds – by the time I got older and could afford champagne I found I didn’t like it. Same with caviar. Alas, no champagne wishes or caviar dreams for me.
But I never lost sight of my desire to be a millionaire, though with inflation I’d now need to be the Six Million Dollar Man in order to give me the same buying power I would have had in first grade. I’m not at the Steve Austin level yet, but I still hope to get there someday.
In fact, I need to get there, for I’ve come to recognize that a bleak sort of financial insecurity gnaws at the deepest levels of my being. Call it my fear of powdered milk. In good times, I worry that things will go bad, and in bad times, I simply worry. My wolf is always at my door.
Always looking on the dark side has insulated me from get-rich-quick schemes and the manias that repeatedly infect investors, thereby preserving my capital, but, of course, there is also a dark side to my dark side: my fear keeps my own investment returns down in the passbook savings range, barely beating inflation.
Seared into my mind is an panel discussion I witnessed many years ago on TV in which a bearish money manager made a convincing case that the then-current investing craze was an ill-conceived bubble that would soon burst. One of the other investors on the panel retorted: “You may be right, but for a long time now a lot of people have made a lot of money being wrong.”
I agreed with the bear – clearly things at that time were headed for ruin – and I agreed with the other panelist – clearly a lot of money had been made by being wrong. Probably most of the money that’s made is made by being wrong. Maybe only a few isolated geniuses seem to do well by doing it right. And even then, I have my doubts about most of them.
So these days I’m left betwixt and between: Just as my worst fears are being confirmed, and for the first time in my adult life I’m in the right, I recognize that if I’m going to make any money at some point I need to leave the shadows behind and walk in the light.
While I await my conversion experience, I can at least console myself that there’s no chance I’ll ever go back to powdered milk: I’ve become lactose intolerant. And until I get that infusion of faith, I’ll keep reciting the following verses from Housman:
I to my perils
Of cheat and charmer
Came clad in armour
By stars benign.
Hope lies to mortals
And most believe her
But man's deceiver
Was never mine.
The thoughts of others
Were light and fleeting,
Of lovers' meeting
Or luck or fame.
Mine were of trouble,
And mine were steady,
So I was ready
When trouble came.
I have been waiting for this entry since the fall of Lehman. (Although I think that these anxieties trace back to dancing school, not to powdered milk.) Bravo!
Posted by: R J Keefe | January 12, 2009 at 08:15 PM
Well said. The personal wealth that so many of us young people have enjoyed for so long was built by worriers. A little grim honesty might have saved the American economy a lot of pain.
Posted by: WellRoasted | January 19, 2009 at 12:03 PM