login
thu posted: Thu 2017-11-30 13:17:45 tags: n/a
vacuum
pick investments
start "Finding Hope and Healing"
filing

In one of the IRA accts, I didn't have enough to meet the minimum balance to buy mutual fund shares, so that pretty much limited me to ETFs if I didn't want to eat a commission fee. I had sold off previous holdings thinking I'd settle the account and consolidate it under a different brokerage house, until I learned there was a fee for account closure, and if I'm resistant to a $7 trade fee I'm sure not happy about giving away $50 just to close the account. So then I thought I'd just let it sit until after the new year when I could fund it more to unlock mutual funds. Today I said, eff it, and put what I could into IVV, an ETF that aims to track the S+P 500. I hesitated, because IVV is trading at 267ish per share, and to me it feels silly to buy less than 10 shares of anything. But there's no rule against it, and it's dumb to just leave cash rotting in sweep at tenth-of-a-percent money market rates, when at least it could be earning dividends more to the tune of 1-2%. Even if the markets barf tomorrow, the whole point of an IRA account is to buy and hold and reap run-off, not hold your breath week-to-week or even year-to-year to flip it for a quick profit.

There was also the matter of the chunks I'd forwarded to other brokerage houses, plus the unallocated funds from when MLPJ liquidated. I rolled about 1/3 each of the MLPJ liquidation into HYLD, HYLV and EMCB - all bond-based income ETFs. My thinking was to balance growth and manage risk against an overdue market correction. My eventual goal for that account is to populate it with buy-and-holds, but the popularly-trumpeted buy-and-hold ETFs are trading at all-time high prices. If you believe the market is overvalued and poised to burp, then it makes negative sense to buy into its indices.

* * *

A few days ago I was withdrawing some personal effects from one of my desk cubbies and found a baggie of mostly blank CD-Rs, plus 2 I'd burned with Toxic Sickness Radio sets. One was cracked so I was probably holding it to burn a replacement, and I think I'd intended to re-record the other with boosted volume to compensate for the low original volume. It occurred to me that it's music that must inescapably be characterized as "angry". Why was I so drawn to angry music, particularly in the early 90s (before I found my niche at Lamart) and pretty much all throughout the Bad Job years, all while not really seeing myself as an angry person? Certainly I was not someone prone to unprovoked angry outbursts, or running around with a chip on my shoulder, primed to act out disproportionally. But it's not unreasonable to suppose I felt unrewarded if not outright trapped at The Bad Job, on top of unprocessed anger from a few old wounds - so filling my commutes with that kind of stimulation probably worked as some sort of controlled catharsis. A safety valve so I didn't shank my miserable coworkers at The Bad Job or burn that bridge entirely.

Anyway, the 2 CDs were two of the lower-quality and lesser-interest mixes and it was easy to just toss them. I contemplated deleting my whole gabber collection, or at least curating it some, perhaps along with rage-y holdings in other genres like, well, RATM. But that's a project for another day.

Also a couple days ago, I learned the founder of LBOM had definitely packed it in and moved on. Early on, I had a bit of a crush and I probably didn't pay enough attention to the reality that there was rarely room in her schedule even just get a cup of coffee together without her ministry circus clamoring on the sidelines. She was forever trapeze-leaping between emergencies. The old saying about "friends for a season, friends for a reason, or friends for a lifetime"... I had hoped we would be friends for a lifetime, but it looks like we were just friends for a reason and evidently my distancing from the ministry was equivalent to letting go of our friendship as well. She identified with the ministry, she poured herself into it, draining herself beyond sustainable limits. It spun off good sustainable programs, at least - for example I wouldn't have piloted the St.G feeding ministry without LBOM's resources, and that's continuing on with a life of its own.