A Break from Personal Finance

I have just returned from an international vacation with my family. Yes, that's where I have been hiding myself.

Something very interesting happened to me in my travels. For the past two weeks or so, I have spent about zero time thinking about our portfolio. I have read exactly zero personal finance blogs. I have checked our bank account exactly zero times. I discovered two things. The first is that our portfolio continues to do its job whether I watch it daily or not. That's not a big surprise given that our portfolio is index based and we do very little trading. Even though I did not check the value of our holdings for over two weeks, the world keeps turning. The second thing I discovered was that this break from my semi-obsessive interest in our financial well-being was a very enjoyable interlude. Who knew? You can completely forget about money, stocks, bills, credit cards and still have a blast. Wow.

As an interesting aside, while we were away, our landlord did some maintenance work on our house. He replaced the water heater, fixed a few minor things that were broken and was even good enough to bring-in two packages that arrived while we were away. The cost of all these nice changes: zero dollars. In fact, I think they could turn this into a MasterCard commercial: international airfare: $1096, two weeks of eating out in a foreign country: $500, coming home to a house that has been fixed up while you were away: priceless. Chalk one up for renting.