What better way to start a Friday than with money talk.

Does anyone else find finances boring? I just can’t get into it.

Years and years ago, my dad caught wind of my propensity to spend money blithely and decided that he was going to attempt to instill some good money habits in me. He encouraged (or forced; it’s so hard to recall) me to meet with a financial planner the family was already familiar with from his bi-annual visits to our home and start putting money away. I started with $50 month, with the understanding that as time went on I’d increase it. I suspect that it wasn’t supposed to take me five or six years to get to that point. Then, last year, I realized that my current savings plan was not much better than storing my money in a shoebox under my bed: you can only make three cents of interest each month for so long before wondering if there’s a better way to make your money work for you. At the rate I was going, I would be able to afford a downpayment for a home by 2035, and that’s if I stopped spending even a cent. I clearly needed to be more deliberate and get into this RRSP nonsense that you hear about but don’t really understand.

So, I bit the bullet and put all the savings I had into RRSPs and then I signed up to put half of each paycheque into investments (split up in some magical way into different “vehicles” that only financial people care to understand). This means that my bank account only receives half of what I make which is fantastic because then I can’t spend it. I’m a big believer that if you don’t see it, you won’t miss it. That right there is an advantage of living at home. I do pay rent but I’m not disillusioned enough to think that the amount I pay is at all comparable to what I’d be paying out there to rent one bedroom in a home.

At least annually, my financial planner comes and lets me know what’s going on with my investments and I hate these meetings because I have no idea what he’s talking about. I just don’t care. I look at this investment thing as a different kind of bank account and I hate hearing that I’ve lost money but since my saving is longterm, I know that things will get better (especially since I’m a conservative to moderate conservative investor and don’t do high risk stuff). I heard the words he’s saying but I don’t understand it. I don’t understand stocks and bonds, or dividends. Although I know the names of the funds I’ve invested in, I have no idea how I would follow them, nor have I tried to learn more. I don’t want to think and I know the studying that I’d have to do to get it would be overwhelming. So I nod and respond positively if he says there’s been an increase and make a more neutral sound when there has been a drop.

Every so often he suggests that I make changes to my investments and I always go along with it: I just don’t know enough to question it and I must admit that makes me a bit nervous because I don’t feel in control of things. Then I think of the work that would be involved understanding things and I go back to not caring.

Maybe when I’m an adult juggling a mortgage and car payments, gaining and losing here and there will matter and knowing whether this investment business is much better than a bank account will mean something to me.

In the meantime I’ll continue to be grateful that there’s somewhere I can put my money that will hopefully result in me having enough money to put a downpayment on a house next year.

So tell me: do you enjoy dealing with your finances? Do budgets and balancing chequebooks fill you with glee? How about saving for retirement, does that excite you? Are you an investor? Do you actually know what most of the financial lingo means?

Edited to add: I just read the page on RRSPs that I linked to and it actually makes sense.

Filed under: Money by jummy