I often make profoundly bad decisions. Several years ago I realized that I should become like George in that episode of Seinfeld where he decides to do the exact opposite of his natural inclination. It's likely that I wouldn't be any worse off if I did that. The problem for me would be tricking myself into first determining what my actual first inclination is, rather than convincing myself that the opposite course was the true path so that, in fact, I ended up doing what I would have decided to do. If you think that's complicated or makes no sense, you should try living in my head for awhile!

So today I made the Apocalypse of financial decisions. With no prospect of a new job coming anytime soon, I chose to cash out my 401(k). Now before you overreact to that statement, it wasn't worth that much. I was 100% invested in company stock, and it would be an understatement to say that First American's stock has been underperforming lately. In fact, there is a convenient chart on Fidelity's website for monitoring the progress of my 401(k) savings plan and since the first of the year it is already down 8.9%. Yes, 8.9% in three weeks. I know stocks are something you play over a long period (unless you're a day-trader), but my actions today seemed more like saving my last few pennies from disappearing. Several centuries ago you could invest your life savings to fund a trading ship on a single voyage, and your return was a percentage of what the ship brought back. If the trip was unsuccessful, you could end up with significantly less than what you started. If your ship was sunk by pirates, you might not even know why you never saw a cent of your investment again. To me, the stock market seems about as safe as the waters off Somalia...

I should get my check within the next few weeks. As I said, it's not all that. It will buy me a few more months to figure out what I'm doing. More significantly, I believe it will give me enough money to make some sort of dramatic change in my life. Right now, the top three dramatic changes I'm thinking about are (in no particular order): buy a new car, move out of San Bernardino, or commit to going back to college full time. If I'm smart, I can maybe swing two of those things. (But, remember the Costanza effect. I'm not very financially smart.)

One of the ideas I've had in my head for the past several weeks is to get into a surveying job/career. I've always wanted to try that. I think it would be cool traipsing about the landscape surveying. I figured there would be some sort of state licensing regulating land surveyors, and I was right. Turns out you need 2 years of post-high school education in surveying just to qualify to take the first level of examination. Not fully disappointed yet at discovering that, I then did some research on where one could acquire that education. Even that pursuit turns out to be difficult as no local schools have programs in that— not even the technical schools like ITT and Devry. I did eventually find a small community college in the city of Orange with a program, which I'm going to check out further. This would be a great way to achieve two of the goals I mentioned earlier, as I would have to move closer to the school to make it happen.

Ugh. So much to think about and figure out.

On a more personally dramatic note, this afternoon I traded in my black DS at GameStop. I have a couple DS Lites, but my black one was my first and my favorite. I have easily 1000+ hours of game playing on it. It was still in remarkably good shape— even the guys at GameStop said so!— but a few months ago I dropped it a few inches and it landed directly on the On/Off switch. Since then, the switch does not want to spring back as it should and lately it takes two or three attempts to switch it on or off. Since I have a back-up DS ready to go, I decided to get a little credit for the broken one. Surprisingly, GameStop gave me $50 credit, which I used to pre-pay for Pokemon Platinum, due in March. I'm a huge Pokemon fan— deal with it.

Laters.

"Money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver."— Ayn Rand