Well, as I mentioned in the last post—eight months ago—I was going to sell my car. I did so just a few weeks ago, and walked away with an $8000 profit.

Now, while I owned my car, I had enough money to pay my bills and eat out and generaly enjoy myself. In fact, I was pretty free with money, but would often find things a little tight when the pay periods were a little farther apart. I never questioned that the money would just go away. I think that the mental frameset was that I had $11000 in debt and that none of the money I was earning was ever mine, so why not spend it?

The end result: I have all this money coming in, and none staying.

With the debt is suddenly gone, the money has nowhere to go. It just sort of sits there. Last month, I spent $300 on new clothes and shoes (some expense I’ve never indulged in, but probably should have), and I still had $200 left over from what I would have spent on one car payment.

The new challenge is to do stuff with the money, rather than simply expand my cost of living. That was a behavior that irked my grandfather to no end, when he was working as an engineer at IBM and Los Alamos – programmers always figured out how to expand to completely fill the ever-advancing hardware. I hope to find some investments that will earn a little more than the paltry sums my bank delivers on savings.

What to invest in, then? All the spam I get has dozens of investment opportunities, and the range of means toward fiscal gains is astonishing. Sounds promising, but I think there’s some non-monetary gains that can still be considered investments.

For instance, I’ve been listening to superb podcasts: Escape Pod - an excellent sci-fi/fiction podcast, and I Should Be Writing - a podcast—as the host calls it—“by a wanna-be writer, for wanna-be writers”. Those shows deserve more money than I can possibly offer, but that’s not going to stop me from trying. Of course, there’s the Lasik that I’ve been wanting for years, and the mention of the new clothes and shoes, which are a treat.

So now I’m on the lookout for more investments, both real and imperceptible, because I think striking that balance might make my life so much more enjoyable than my previous strategy.