Money Is Weird

Managing my money is so weird. It is literally just a number - somewhere out there, some electrical signals on a rack of RAM on some server somewhere in the world determines what kind of house I live in, what kind of car I drive to work, to some extend my kid’s upbringing. And I work hard every day, with the intention that those signals maybe move over a few bits such that my life is better.

What’s even more crazy is that if I move the electrical representation of my net worth from, let’s say Bank of America’s savings account server to Betterment’s (not sponsored) 5.5% APY server, my net worth a few years later will be completely different! The simple act of touching my screen a few times and a tiny bit of exponential growth magic can determine whether I have enough extra cash for a Tesla, or even retire a few years earlier! The few times I touch my screen compounded over time will have a more profound impact than busting my ass at work and getting a high bonus. I guess that’s why people say let money work for you.

It just seems crazy to me that moving some numbers around can alter my net worth more than an entire lifetime’s time and energy spent towards some career path… In an ideal world, all the money I don’t need would be automatically invested and taken care of so that I don’t need to worry about if I’m literally trashing thousands of dollars by not putting money where it should go. I guess that’s why there are accounts like Betterment and Acorn and mutual funds to some extent, but I wish there was something more fundamental and basic, provided by some not-for-profit government branch or something…

Maybe I’m just underselling the amount of work that goes into finance. The few clicks you do on a bank or stocks app could be motivated by months of research, which I guess is what big financial firms do. This line of thinking is also why I don’t think I’d be very motivated if I worked at financial companies. Instead of providing tangible value to customers and value through building important services everyone uses (for ex. my meta team is responsible for storing photos and videos that can be accessed anywhere from around the globe, ensuring they are safe and available in the face of all everything from disk corruption to natural disasters), financial companies seem to spin money out of thin air.

In some way, at the risk of sounding like a complete financial noob, that’s how I feel about the economy, and the fact that it can’t be predicted. It’s crazy to me that despite no material change to the physical world, like a big natural disaster, or a war, or a worker strike, or a new technology, the economy can go from performing extremely well to crashing like it did in 2008 in an instant.

On a slightly related note, we also just spent 2.4K on our cat’s dental and teeth extractions :/ Despite adoption fees being only 300$, I wonder if breeders can guarantee such health characteristics so we can save money on vet visits in the long run. And unfortunately we did not think to buy pet insurance because our cat’s only two years old. Bummer