numbers fun

I had a couple different thoughts, but they both involve somewhat rather random numbers which I nonetheless find interesting this afternoon as I settle into the Chiefs game and putting off errands I should have run yesterday.

First, on the topic of football, I think it is becoming increasingly clear that the NFL this season is substantially less interesting than the baseball season was. Now, I’m a big baseball fan, so personally that’s my opinion most years, but I recognize that football is generally perceived as the prime American sport. This year, however, is downright boring. There are good teams and bad teams, and we knew them very early on, and frankly, there’s little anticipation that anything exciting is going to happen. I was checking ESPN’s predictions for this week, where they have eight commentators and one computer calculation choose who they think will win. Of the 16 games playing this weekend, only 5 had a 4/5 or 3/6 split. 9 out of the 16 were unanimous consensus picks – a whopping 56%. I checked last week, and of the 7 unanimous picks, 6 won. Combine that with the fact that there are NFC teams with losing records in the playoff hunt, and you’re just thankful for college football. Wait, scratch that, we’ve known all season Ohio State and USC would meet in the Rose Bowl. That’s what happens when you root for Notre Dame, Michigan travels to Columbus, and you have roommates from Texas and Florida. Oh, did I leave out Arkansas and Boise State? Cry me a river.

The other thing is quite happy. It’s been roughly two years now since I was at DFC (financial services), and my retirement account hit a fun but totally arbitrary milestone. It topped $5K! I suspect that will about buy me a new pair of glasses and lunch at McDonald’s by the time I’m 90, but that’s the point. The principal won’t get you very far; you need lots of investment return to outpace inflation. And spoil the grandkids with fancy new plasma holoscreens. According to Quicken, if I’ve put in all the data correctly, my Roth has netted an annualized 15.6% over the last two years. Not too shabby.

As a general not-so-gentle nudge, if $5,000 sounds like a lot of money, put more money into your retirement account. Now.

It was really eye-opening meeting people and person and after person, a difficult but solvable issue was how to save. A much more difficult issue which many hadn’t even really thought about solving was procrastination. So many people I met knew it was important, and wanted to be saving; they just hadn’t started (there's always next year...). And of course, I’m in the same boat. I had some fun playing around with my car money in college (Ameritrade is great fun), but I didn’t start saving long-term until I was actually working in financial services.

Don’t be a slacker :)