In The Beginning...

A very-very long time ago (when I was about 13) one of my math teachers, Mrs. Fox, decided to play a little "game" in an effort to get us involved with numbers and graphing. The game was your typical "stock pick-em" game where you started with $100K and after two weeks you had to chart all your gains and losses. The one with the biggest gain won. I was not the winner....not even close. I ended up losing a lot of money...

Looking back, while this was a great math/graphing lesson, it was a terrible lesson in investing. Mission accomplished Mr. Fox! Clearly, a two week horizon was too short and the reason I lost ;-) I recall that the winner just randomly chose a stock and got lucky. One of my major holdings was this company called IBM because I was already into computers. Well, unfortunately in the late 80's IBM was not the rocket I desired (that did not happen until about '93). So I ended up shuffling around a bunch of stocks chasing the high fliers and generally doing nothing more than losing money to transaction fees...hmmm...come to think of it, this might have been a pretty good lesson in investing --> in how NOT to invest!

All I remember was being terribly frustrated with my current "holdings" but always being able to build scenarios where I could have made a killing...only if I knew which stocks were "good" and which were IBM ;-) And thus the seed of interest in personal finance was first planted.

I do have another blog for more general family stuff, but I found very quickly that I liked to write about money topics...a personal passion. So, I decided not to bore my family to death with finance posts and decided to move my financial diatribes over here. I will be exploring the path that led me to this point in my life and writing about financial interests/decisions moving forward. Hope you enjoy the ride...and feel free to commend/ask questions along the way...seeing as that is a big part of blogging....