(Prosperity - Brian S Glaser)
After searching high and low for a good financial planner and advisor, I found the perfect one on the pillow next to mine. My wife Eileen, a textile designer by day, uses her own quick wits to handle all fiscal matters big and small for our household. Pillow Talk is a close look at marriage, finance and communication.
At the beginning of Anna Karenina, Tolstoy writes: "Every happy family is the same, but unhappy families are all different." As the crushing weight of the economic crash lands on families across America, I can't help but have the nagging feeling that there are a lot of unhappy families out there, and all of them are probably unhappy in slightly different ways.
Even in our own two-person family unit, Eileen and I are unhappy about the onslaught of bad fiscal news in different ways. My unhappiness can probably be boiled down to the profoundly un-Tolstoy-like phrase: "What the hell?!?" Since the missus hadnles all things economic, I'm finding myself uncomfortably out in the cold on this one. Suddenly, I really need to understand what the whole "credit default swap" problem is...nevermind that as an editor of a magazine about art I am decidedly underqualified to do anything to counteract the forces dragging the markets into the gutter. But just like a foreign war will suddenly make everyone break out the atlas and start parsing the maps for all the countries that end in "-istan," each bit of bad Wall Street news is making me feel nakedly unarmed in the Econo-Wars.
Eileen, on the other hand, is unhappy for entirely different reasons. Two, really: a) The bottom-line blowouts that appear in our investment account and 401(k) statements (all of which are underwritten by her carefully crafted investing strategies); and b) Her desperate drive to buy up these depressed stocks, which sits in conflict with her (and everyone else's) inability to determine if this is the bottom...or if the lower stats the next week are, in fact, the real bottom.
Basicially, I think my wife is a bit of a prisoner of the prevailing wisdom. The smart money says, of course, to "buy low" - and man oh man does it all seem low right now. But on the other hand, all of the smartest financial wizards somehow managed to make a long, long series of bad calls here, and it makes it hard to know where to turn for the best info. I mean, sure the market is pretty low right now...but that's by conventional measures. In theory, it could be headed a lot lower. Or not. Maybe.
So now, maybe once a week, Eileen gazes into my eyes across the dinner table and whispers romantically, "Can I put some more money into the investment account?" (It's what every man longs to hear.) I say yes...but I've also taken to agreeing to a lower number than the initial proffer. So she's buying, and keeping a steady hand on our long-term investment tiller, as we reassure each other and wait this storm out. But while I don't know nearly as much about the markets as my wife does, it also seems pretty clear that right now no one really knows all that much of anything.
I'm all for a little risk - it's where reward comes from, after all - but as I've tried to defeat my unhappiness with a (very) little knowledge, it seems to me that the whole country is wading into fairly unknown fiscal waters. The conventional wisdom has been driven by the unwise, it seems, and while I still count my wife as one of the truly wise (she can still outperform the market on a good day!), I'm also keeping my eye on making sure that we continue to be one of the those blandly, generally happy families.
