A friend perceptively asked me, recently, if the current stockmarket situation might be influencing my glum mood about things, lately. I often make a big deal out of the fact that money doesn't matter that much to me. But partly, that's a matter of trying to convince myself, maybe. It's not that I want to have money… but if money I already have seems to be lost or wasted, I often react irrationally, graspingly. Something of that old "scotch," behaviorally inherited from my mother's parents, via my mother and uncle.
So yes, losing $5000 in "paper net worth" in about a week is not painless, no matter what I might say or try to believe. I can take a huge amount of solace in the fact that, if my portfolio had been configured as it was up to about 14 months ago (i.e. up to when I decided to move to Korea), that disappeared $5000 would have been $20000. But, because of my decision to make my investments more conservative, I backed out a lot of my equities in August, 2006. The consequence, now, is that this current tumble is much less painful than it might have been. Still, the investments I did decide to keep were mostly of the riskier variety (including an Indian stockmarket fund [down 70% from my purchase price] and Starbucks [down 65% from my purchase price]).
Of course, the Korean currency is crashing too. Everything's crashing, one way or another. The Korean national bank is managing a sort of artificial crash for their currency (I'm guessing, here–I don't know this for sure), as this may be the most prudent macroeconomic way to try to actually, ultimately, soften the export-driven economy's landing vis-a-vis the world situation. But that means I've also lost several thousand dollars-equivalent because I am sitting on a KRW cash hoard. Now is the time to make purchases in Korea using my U.S. credit card, however–I can exploit the new lower valued-currency.
Um… what major purchase is that? I don't know. Maybe a new computer? I sure do feel unhappy with this one, sometimes. Last night I was trying to use my work website, here at home, and was getting really frustrated with the way Vista "tries too hard" to manage the non-western character encoding on the flash components (not that that's particularly robust design on the part of the Korean-based website!). The consequence was that the spreadsheets of students' grades popping up on my screen were mostly gobbledygook. Argh.
Maybe I could buy a nice computer with a Korean version of XP installed? Not sure that would ease the frustration factor – I would be exchanging neverending technical frustration with Microsoft's Vista for the linguistic uncertainties of something that is technically more robust. But…