I Love Spending Money

Besides spending a gadzillion reimbursable dollars on my credit cards, I've been pretty good about spending money this past month. And that's been a good thing too, since all of my retirement and stock accounts have lost hundreds upon hundreds of dollars. My plan to spend frugally while the stock market takes a hit is not working as well as I'd like in terms of balancing my net worth. I'd like to not lose money, even if I have to deal with not making any. But my net worth keeps going up and down, and now it's on a downward trend. I don't feel like I'm spending a lot, but with half of my savings tied up in stocks and such, the recession is hitting hard.

I do trust that over time most of my stocks will go up. Or at least I hope they will. I'm not going to pull out now just because I've lost lots of money. But I'm less excited about putting more money into stocks.

I kind of wish I put more money into that liquid 4% rate CD that I got a bit less than a year ago. Now the CD rates are at like 2%. Ick. After paying off my credit cards and bills, I'm not sure where to put my money right now. I still want to max out my Roth IRA for the year, but I only have $1700 left to do that.

I'm also planning on going to Israel this summer for the birthright program. It's a free trip, but i still have to pay to get to the airport in New York (a $300 flight) and then I'll have to pay for anything I want to buy while I'm there. Also, I might want to add on some time and travel a round a bit after the official trip, which will cost more. And I promised myself that next time I travel abroad I will buy a good DSLR camera to take with me. So... I think that time might be coming up.

So I do want to have some liquid assets. But I don't want to just keep it all in my ING account, that seems kind of wasteful. As I've written before, I'm slowly adding more funds to Prosper (I'm up to $250 and 5 loans so far)... that seems to be the best way for me to make a decent rate of return on my money in these sour economic times. But the risk makes me nervous as well.

All I want to do this year is get my networh at least up to $30k. It's at $27k now but it goes up and down all the time. I'd love to get my networth to $35k this year, but it really depends how the job situation pans out, and if I can manage figuring out where to save money without losing it.