No Wolf, No Wall Street (But Maybe a Little Coke)

I checked the mail yesterday and saw that Tara had a special delivery.

“Your porno mag’s here!” I told her, and tossed it onto the dining room table. She looked at me askance and then burst out laughing.

Hey, scoff if you will, but there were some nice melons on page 84.

If you don’t believe that plants are a turn-on for the missus, clearly you have not been to our house. They’re everywhere: the living room, bedrooms, office, kitchen, bathrooms. Tara strategically hung three plants over our bed. Right above our pillows, no less. I sometimes have nightmares of philodendrons crashing down on my head while I’m sleeping.

So, even though I am sometimes prone to bouts of exaggeration—shocking, I know!—calling a seed catalog porn is no stretch in this household.

There’s a joke about deflowering in here too, I’m sure. Not gonna touch that one with a ten-foot hose.

Economics was a required course in my senior year of high school. It was a pretty interesting class, especially our semester-long project in which we “bought” stocks from the NYSE and followed their progress over the months. How our portfolio performed helped determine our overall grade. I don’t remember which stocks I chose, but all semester, I led the class.

Right up until the very last day, when somebody else swooped into first place, bumping me to second. I suspect insider trading.

In any case, it was a fun assignment, and taught me quite a bit about personal finance. I remember the rush, watching my stocks rise and fall on a daily basis. Kinda made me feel like the Wolf of Wall Street, minus the hookers and cocaine. I always imagined once I turned into an actual adult, I’d be one who played the stock market.

Only, my financial situation sucked for many years. One doesn’t have the flexibility to dabble in stocks and bonds when one is bouncing checks and barely keeping up with one’s house payments. Damn you, subprime ARM mortgage.

In any case, that’s all water under the bridge. Now that I’m debt-free and making decent bucks, I’m in a position to try my hand at investing. You know where this is leading, right?

Call me Captain Crypto.

I opened a Coinbase account and am investing a small amount into both Bitcoin and Ethereum. $25 each per week in a strategy known as “dollar cost averaging.” I have learned so much these past few weeks! When Tara and I combined our finances into a joint account, I never closed my personal checking account and have a little over $1,000 just sitting there. I am limiting myself to that balance, as it’s money I am comfortable enough losing. I signed into that account for the first time in ages the other day and have been losing $4/month in maintenance fees anyway.

I’m not looking to get rich quick, and in fact, figure my odds of making any money from cryptocurrency are pretty slim. I plan to hold onto it through all the ups and downs though just to see what happens. This will be a long-term investment mostly for fun. Again, without hookers or cocaine.

I currently own 0.000024 of one BTC and that will barely get me a 12 oz. can of Coke.

39 thoughts on “No Wolf, No Wall Street (But Maybe a Little Coke)”

    1. No, not at all. Tara is well aware of this and watching with interest. I have her full support (mostly because it’s all my money to lose, I suspect!). But yeah…it’ll be fun keeping you guys posted.

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  2. That’s kinda how it was when I bought stock in Solgaard, the maker or my new suitcase. Well, ok, there’s a bit of hope that it’ll be the next Microsoft, but I’m not holding my breath.

    Dying to know how you like your Aero Garden. I’ve always been kind of curious about them. Do you have to buy proprietary seed/soil disks or can you just plant some seeds from the ol’ garden center? How long does it take from planting to harvestable crop? Does it use gobs of electricity? Pros/cons? I feel a blog post coming on here, don’t you? 😉

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    1. I got the Aero Garden for Tara for Christmas. So far, it’s been a great experience…I’ll have to share a close-up pic in a future post, because everything is going gangbusters in there. The lights are low-energy LED so I doubt we’ll notice an uptick in electricity costs—especially with all the other grow lights we’ve got running in the house! The first batch of seeds was a proprietary mix from Aero Garden, but I also got her some empty pods that you can supposedly fill with any seeds of your choice. I’m sure she’ll be trying that out in the near future.

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  4. I am impressed with your spirit of adventure, investing in something that could make you rich beyond your wildest dreams. If by chance it doesn’t you have your Aero Garden to fall back on, growing your own lettuce.

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    1. Thank you! This is something I wouldn’t have been able to do even two years ago. I believe going into it with a realistic attitude that it’s risky as hell and I may end up losing every dime is the right approach. A lot of people try to time the market and their intention is to turn around and sell for a quick profit. I think that’s a full game. You have to be in it for the long run; if I’d done this 10 years ago, I would absolutely be rolling in wealth.

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  5. So Tara agreed to let you try your hand at Bitcoin after all. She wasn’t able to talk you out of it? I remember that stock market assignment in high school. Even by the end, I didn’t have a clue what I was doing. Did my stock do well? No idea.
    I love plants too. Sadly, I mostly kill them though.Happy days for Tara!

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    1. She didn’t even try to talk me out of it. I think we have a mutual agreement: she can look at all the seed porn she wants and I can throw all my money into virtual currency. It’s a bedrock for a solid marriage!

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  8. Seed catalogue porn eh? Love it! My choice of porn is houses and interior decor. It became a serious addiction some years back but these days, just a few issues a year meets the need. My mother is like Tara, I kill plants, even the ones my mother carefully selected for me as virtually impossible to kill. She knows better now and gifts me only cut flowers 😀 I’ve never slept with anything above the head of the bed, not even a picture on the wall – I seem to remember something negative about it in feng shui.

    Good luck with the Bitcoin experiment – have fun!

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      1. Just my luck that one of the things allowed in the bedroom is something I’m guaranteed to kill 😀 and dead plants is very bad feng shui. But thanks for the update, I’ll not fight my mother if she decided to add them above her bed as well as everywhere else!

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  10. I love plants, but anything above the bed makes me nervous because earthquakes. I was in a pretty bad quake long ago and there were so many people with bloody heads from pictures over their beds falling during the earthquake and landing on them. To this day, when I go back to the East Coast and see a picture over a bed, my knee jerk reaction is “WHHYYY?”

    Sir, you go to sleep a brave (or possibly foolish) man every night.

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    1. I totally get that! I lived in the Bay Area for eight years, including the Loma Prieta earthquake. Suffice it to say, I never hung anything above the bed down there. I also developed a not-so-irrational fear of ever stopping my car beneath an overpass. California really messes with your mind! Fortunately, we do not have earthquakes here. Just blizzards, and they won’t rattle the walls. Tornados can happen too, but they’re rare. And if they do, I figure, it won’t just be pictures falling off the walls. It’ll be walls falling.

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  12. You know after your post about bitcoin a bit ago, I was going to suggest you just dabble a bit. You know, throw in a few bucks here and there and see what happens.
    I’m happy you were able to read my mind and go for it. 😳

    Like Tara, I love plants too. They say you can get to a man’s heart with food, for us it’s living green things.

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