Money
 

What do you guys think about investing yr money, making it "work for you." My dad has been encouraging me to research the whole world of investing, yadda yadda yadda, and its all so strange and unfamiliar. Any random comments about currency would entertain me.

Sell all of your possesions, burn the profit, and go live in the woods.

I would do this, but I don't have the balls.

BTW, my parents and my sister live in Savannah.

well there is this whole association of "money is dirty" which i find really harmful but money is nothing more than the language of... human energy?

so i'd say YEAH make money & increase it. make it work for you so you don't have to become one of those wal-mart greeters when you're 80.

or save enough cash so you can take a year off to write your novel.

etc.

the myth of the starving artist is a damaging one. who the fuck can write on an empty stomach? lies!!! & fuck tuberculosis.

anyway there's the whole ethical/moral issue of the use of money, and truly, we can't predict anything, given the law of unintended consequences, etc. etc., but if we decide to go ahead & live, well, then, you don't have to be a capitalist pig, an oil warmonger-- you can invest & be a different sort of capitalist.

see the calvert fund

see also working assets, though they don't invest your money, that's the idea... they used to be my long distance company. well they are a nonprofit. im confusing, am i not?

oh, more info on socially responsible investment here

anyway yeah man, don't work for the money, it's an ungrateful chore. have the money work for you, & then you can be free to work doing what you love.

i have heard that property is a good place to invest money.

i dont think that haaving money makes you evil. certainly having too much money and not doing anything good with it is. i think it depends on what you do with it that counts. but i dont think that there is anything wrong with being comfortable and having money to support yourself.

I don't like wiping my ass with leaves.

I heard that a really good investing technique is to put $40.00 a week into a savings bond, and if you do that since you were born, by the time you're 30, you'll have over $144,000 assuming the interest rate is 1.5%. Then you can use the money to buy property or build an apartment, that way you can make continuous money the rest of your life from rent.

I have always had problems with the idea of making money with money. It seems that the richest people in the world do a lot of shifting funds around, and it has always been difficult for me to reconcile making money without actually producing a good or service. The people who make the most money this way are people that already had a lot of cash to begin with.
Then again, we live in the world and I say if you have the means, see what your options are. Providing needed funds to a business you believe in is a fine thing to do, especially when it comes back to you in your favor.

It's easy for me to talk though; I live hand to mouth and investing is not part of my world.

Savannah is a great place for yr parents and sister to live, says I.

So, I've been looking into the whole SRI thing and it seems like a good idea. If I could put three or four hundred dollars a month into investments that average out to a 10-12 percent return, then I'll have a down payment on a house by the time I get out of college. I'm checking out ETFs (I don't feel like explaining it, and I doubt many people on this board care), and I've found an index-fund that tracks clean energy companies. Seems like a good balance between ethics and profit.

As for the whole savings bond thing... If you (or yr parents) HAD 40 dollars a week since you were born, you could put it in a money market account, and make twice that money or more by the time yr thirty. But 2000 a year is a lot to give yr child when you've got bills, retirement, etc. That's assuming yr not putting any money aside for college, etc.

Yeah, yeah...

Thanks for yr time.