Debt to Dreams

If financial apathy were a disease it would be considered an epidemic. It would be a deadly, debilitating disease that ruins lives. Common age of onset would be late 20’s but we are starting to see signs of childhood onset as well. It is treatable with education but is rarely diagnosed until it is a late stage disease.

Currently I have come down with a mild case of financial apathy. There was a mild prodrome of symptoms in April but it is now in full effect. I likely exposed to it from multiple sources and have been unable to shake it over the past two weeks. This is likely due to multiple reasons:

1. My work hours in the hospital have increased somewhat making it more difficult to keep up with the blogsphere as well as my usual readings.
2. I have taken on added responsibility at work which has renewed my enthusiasm for the field of Medicine, relegating blogging to 3rd fiddle behind family and work.
3. We have hit a plateau in actively managing our money. Over the past 5 months we have done a good job of cutting expenses, budgeting and automating our savings. At this point we have fallen in a routine of saving X amount of our income per month +/- any unexpected expenses.
4. We remain about 2 years out from any “real” changes in net worth. In this regard our life is like that of most Americans. We will not see any large changes in our net worth one way or the other and will just continue to chip away at our 6-figure debt.

The elephant in the room that I need to address is the management of our retirement investments. Currently they remain invested in a mixture of overlapping funds in dire need of an overhaul. I have yet to bite the bullet and make a well balanced portfolio out of the mess. I think that I will be able to address this later in the year when things have settled down at work again.

Thanks for following along. Check back in 2010 when I finally finish my training. By then I should finally be able to start making a dent in my school loans and will be able to play catch up with my retirement savings.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 12th, 2007 at 9:14 pm and is filed under Random Musings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.