Bulls, Bears and Comfort Zones

By TAD BARTIMUS

My grandmother kept her extra money in her garter belt. Once in a while she’d take it out, count it, maybe spend a little or give us some to buy candy, then put it back. The bills were always crisp and green; at age six that was impressive.

Now I am old enough to be a grandmother. I don't own a garter belt. Any extra money I get I put in something called a mutual fund. I can neither count it nor spend it. There are no bills -- no $100s or even $20s -- to fondle and make me feel rich. Instead, there is a monthly statement that looks like it came from the gas company. It is not impressive.

"Enough" is a relative term. To my dad it meant a squirrel in the stew pot. To a family member in the next generation it means taking your golf pro with you on vacation.

The only number I ever look at, because it's the only one I understand, is the last number on the bottom of the right hand side. It tells me what I've got. Lately, what I've got is going down.

I know I should be worried, but all I feel is detached. I react the same way when I pick up a business magazine in the doctor's office and some expert is chastising me for not starting a retirement account when I was a teenage babysitter. Who knew?

When my father was a boy he hunted squirrels for food. That was during the Great Depression, when unemployed men went to my grandmother's back door looking for a handout and always found one, when parents left their children on orphanage steps so they'd get fed. Of those days, my dad always said, "We were lucky. We always had enough."

"Enough" is a relative term. To my dad it meant a squirrel in the stew pot. To a family member in the next generation it means taking your golf pro with you on vacation. One person's financial security is $40,000 a year and health insurance; another's is $4 million in a Swiss bank and a yacht in Bermuda. As a multi-millionaire friend once said: "You can only wear one watch, drive one car and sleep in one bed at a time; all the rest is ego. But some egos are bigger than others."

Intellectually, I know that a microchip made in China affects the price of a house in Seattle, that a run on a Moscow bank affects the interest rate at my own. But since I’ve never taken possession of the money in my mutual fund -- never touched it, bought candy with it, been impressed by it -- I don't feel like I’ve lost it. Since I have more now than when I started saving, aren't I still ahead? This attitude causes my Merrill Lynch friend to react the same way my high school geometry teacher did when I insisted that infinity had to end SOMEWHERE, he just didn’t know where it was.

No matter what the Dow Jones does, I will go on clipping coupons for toothpaste and spaghetti sauce, impulse buy "Titanic" on video, use middle octane gas in the car. I will listen to the talking heads predict the future, then turn them off because I know they can't. My only concession to a coming bear market will be a new garter belt.

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