A friend perceptively asked me, recently, if the current stockmarket situation might be influencing my glum mood about things, lately. I often make a big deal out of the fact that money doesn't matter that much to me. But partly, that's a matter of trying to convince myself, maybe. It's not that I want to have money... but if money I already have seems to be lost or wasted, I often react irrationally, graspingly. Something of that old "scotch," behaviorally inherited from my mother's parents, via my mother and uncle.
So yes, losing $5000 in "paper net worth" in about a week is not painless, no matter what I might say or try to believe. I can take a huge amount of solace in the fact that, if my portfolio had been configured as it was up to about 14 months ago (i.e. up to when I decided to move to Korea), that disappeared $5000 would have been $20000. But, because of my decision to make my investments more conservative, I backed out a lot of my equities in August, 2006. The consequence, now, is that this current tumble is much less painful than it might have been. Still, the investments I did decide to keep were mostly of the riskier variety (including an Indian stockmarket fund [down 70% from my purchase price] and Starbucks [down 65% from my purchase price]).
Of course, the Korean currency is crashing too. Everything's crashing, one way or another. The Korean national bank is managing a sort of artificial crash for their currency (I'm guessing, here--I don't know this for sure), as this may be the most prudent macroeconomic way to try to actually, ultimately, soften the export-driven economy's landing vis-a-vis the world situation. But that means I've also lost several thousand dollars-equivalent because I am sitting on a KRW cash hoard. Now is the time to make purchases in Korea using my U.S. credit card, however--I can exploit the new lower valued-currency.
Um... what major purchase is that? I don't know. Maybe a new computer? I sure do feel unhappy with this one, sometimes. Last night I was trying to use my work website, here at home, and was getting really frustrated with the way Vista "tries too hard" to manage the non-western character encoding on the flash components (not that that's particularly robust design on the part of the Korean-based website!). The consequence was that the spreadsheets of students' grades popping up on my screen were mostly gobbledygook. Argh.
Maybe I could buy a nice computer with a Korean version of XP installed? Not sure that would ease the frustration factor - I would be exchanging neverending technical frustration with Microsoft's Vista for the linguistic uncertainties of something that is technically more robust. But...
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