Current Events

"What's worse, Auburn's offense, or the Economy?"

This was written on a sign I saw on College Gameday on Saturday. I thought it was pretty funny at the time, but now it's just kind of sad as the Dow keeps dropping and Tommy Tuberville fired Auburn's offensive coordinator this week. I'm not too stressed out about the economy (okay, I'm not stressed out at all) for several reasons:

1) From everything I read, the economy is not even close to as bad as it has been in the past 10-20 years, it's just being publicized more and the media is having a hayday making people freak out (can we say "Election" in less than 30 days?) I've heard more about the candidates plans for the "mortgage crisis" (aka when banks got greedy and sold subprime mortgages to broke people) than I have about healthcare or education or anything else I place higher value on.

2) I have more than 30 years until retirement so my 401K has plenty of time to recover...let's just hope this doesn't happen again right before I retire! That actually is the one thing I feel really bad about, is those who are close to retirement age and do not have 20-30 years to let their investments recover.

3) I'm actually thinking about putting more money in to my 401K and opening up a Roth IRA. From everything I've been reading, it makes more sense to buy stocks now because you can buy more of them for less money and then gain more in the long run as they appreciate.

One of the websites/blogs that I really enjoy reading is The Simple Dollar. I added it to my blogroll a few weeks ago but don't think I ever commented on it. The guy who writes it is actually only a couple of years older than me but I find his posts interesting and informative. Sometimes he takes things a little to the extreme (he makes his own laundry detergent!) but overall I enjoy it. He simplifies things that are intimidating to me (i.e. stock charts) and offers a lot of good suggestions about life stuff in general.