All these thoughts... part 2

Well, its been two weeks and I think I’ve got a good, but by no means great, start on my financial plan. When I got home two weeks ago, the paperwork for the pension payout from my old job was waiting on me. Lets just say that complicated was hardly the word for that mess. That was the final straw, causing me to make that call to a financial advisor.

I met with my new advisor a few days later. We walked through my finances, my income, my debt and my assets, financial and physical. By the end of the hour, I had opened 4 new accounts (one of which was temporary I now see) and had the knowledge I needed to deal with rolling over my 401k and my pension. That paperwork was completed by that evening and I am now awaiting the disbursement checks so the money can be deposited in accounts over which only I have control.

The one downside of this approach is that my advisor believes a bit too much in hedging my bets and not investing in a lot of high-growth funds. For the moment, since each individual account has less than a minimum for selecting my own funds, he entered me into a fund-of-funds that fits a certain risk profile, which for me is an aggressive growth fund. Despite that classification, and it being a very good set of funds, I just don’t see 10-12%/year as aggressive enough. I truly feel that my minimum yearly average return should be at least 15%. The problem with this is, getting someone to manage my money for me, in the small amount it is, to make that kind of return is near impossible.

Now that the existing investments have been dealt with, I have to concern myself with the investments from my continuing income. Because of my slow training schedule on the new job, there is no way I’ll be getting a bonus this quarter, but there is hope for the next quarter of a very nice bonus. I plan on dropping every penny of that in an investment account of some type, and hope to do the same for every penny of at least three of the four yearly bonuses I should receive from then on.

Even with that, its not enough. I’ve always said I have zero desire to be rich, and I still stand by that statement. However, I realize now that what I would like to be is someone who does accumulate wealth in vast quantities. That seems to be a drastic contradiction, I know, but it really is not. I want to accumulate the money that comes my way, not to necessarily spend it as soon as I receive it. The money that I do not spend needs to be invested, not for the sheer fact of having even more money, but to be a good steward of what has come to me.

So, now I’ve got this on my mind… if it is true that I want my money to work for me, and not for me to work for money, to what work can I set my money? It keeps coming back to that one big idea, that opportunity that will soon be gone, that potentially life-altering moment where I change from being the worker to the one who has work being done on his behalf. I just can’t see it. I am hoping that, during my time traveling through many large companies, it will become evident, but my honest thought is that it will not. I know that lots of people create their fortune from an idea that came to them in their corporate job, but I just don’t see that happening for me. I am to much of an anti-corporate type for that to occur.

So where does that leave me? I think I need to ask my father for the biggest advice he could ever give me… where did he get his idea to move from working for someone else to starting his own business? I know that he spent years working on and around automobiles before starting his auto parts business, but what was the inspiration to do so? It was obviously a subject area in which he had a great deal of knowledge, but what lead him to pick that in particular?

I look at the areas in which I either know a lot or have potential and know that I could go in a lot of ways, but so many of these areas are already overly crowded with too many people trying to force their way to greatness. I love technology, the ideas with creating a great business, writing, reading, automobiles and home improvement. To categorize those, I love exercises which stretch the mind and then push the body to create what the mind has first dreamed.

Total honesty, something I strive for when writing, requires me to mention the slight bit of fear here. I enjoy dreaming and creating for their own sake, not because of what those things can bring me monetarily. There is also an element of distraction and laziness in all the hobbies I have. Each provides a distraction from the normal activities in which I engage and when I get tired of one hobby, I can get lazy about it because there is some other new hobby just around the corner to try. If only I could accumulate wealth like I accumulated hobbies.