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Financial Planning

Though I kept company with a bond trader for some years, and have owned all or part of three businesses so far, in truth I do not understand money. Believing the stock market to be over-valued at 2,000, for example, I chose to invest my freelance earnings from the grunge era in an art gallery.

Vox Populi lasted a year and a half, but we had fun. I think my partner had more fun, but he had less to lose.

My vocation as a writer taught me what to do in the absence of money: Buy Ramen when it's on sale, principally, and learn to need as little as possible. For any number of years my retirement plan consisted of one bitter sentence: I'll be a burden on society, so as to repay it for being such a burden on me. But at some point -- right around marriage and parenthood, probably -- the consequences of that decision-making seem less attractive.

Much has been made for most of my adult life of the instability and undependability of Social Security. Don't expect it to be there when you need it, we've been told; or don't expect it to support you. It won't be enough. And so generations have scrambled to set money aside.

What we have done with all our obsessive retirement planning, it occurred to me in the shower this morning, is fuel the capital markets. It is our retirement monies which make possible corporate consolidation. We have paid for Clear Channel and WalMart and the aggregation of record labels into a handful of hands (though that seems more and more a pyrrhic victory). It is our retirement funds which have been leveraged to turn farmlands into suburbs, to turn small downtowns into wastelands and antique malls, to end the era of the sustainable family business.

And because most of us aren't stupid enough to try to micro-manage the investments which show up on our quarterly reports (or smart enough; but I think the game's rigged, or beyond my understanding, or both) we've largely been oblivious to the consequences of our choice.

We seek to use socially responsible investment screens with our modest savings, but without obsessing with a financial planner (who's inclined to think we're nuts, anyhow, choosing a lower rate of return), I couldn't tell you if we were investing in WalMart and Starbucks, both of which are or may be working to hurt my in-laws' coffeeshop and bookstore.

How different would our futures be we strangled the capital markets and chosen, instead, to invest in Social Security?

I dunno. I don't understand about money.

But it's a thought.

Posted by grant on December 1, 2007 11:01 AM | Permalink