I’ve been telling myself and others that I need to write down what has happened and what not so that I can identify the problem basically so that I can come up with a solution.
The basic problem here is that I have spent six years being completely demoralized about once per year, well scratch that. I have spent the prior decade facilitating my demoralization in retrospect. In that regards my whole life kind of came off the rails around 2010 when I was investing in companies that didn’t exist and gaining notoriety.
Long story short, the past 6 years have been grueling and miserable, misery I brought on myself. And, obviously, this misery is self imposed. I borrowed money and paid interest of about $25,000 per year. The basic premise is that for maybe 4 years now I have been at max-borrow. I think I re-upped the borrow once or twice. My previous plan was whenever I could calculate that I would be better off if I borrowed, I should. That said, I have been perpetually wrong about the sequential series of events. It pains me to look at things right now, so I won’t because I don’t have to. That said, Lamberth’s ruling was the first shoe to drop. That one wasn’t major. The first major shoe to drop was the appeal of the lamberth ruling, when that ruling came out, the stock price dumped pretty hard. I was relatively okay with it. That said, there needs to be some sort of rule that when you take on debt like I have and things go favorably, that you sell like 1% every 10% it goes up until your debt is paid off, there are reasons behind this.
First, every month I run a deficit of about $3000. That means that I have to sell stock every month to pay my bills. In other words, I work for less than nothing. If I wasn’t in debt, I would be running a surplus of about $3000 a month. That’s $100/day of walk around money. This has implications. I walk around these days basically demoralized and under the basic premise that I’m worthless because I feel like I have nothing to give to anyone after being destroyed financially and emotionally.
Anyway that’s about it, working hard and being successful in that dimension only to have everything you’re working hard for be pre-spent for years kind of takes the wind out of your sails on a daily basis. You go around and you’ve given everything you have to give except advice and advice only goes so far, especially when at this point with history as a guide everything I have touched instead of turning to gold turns into a steaming stinky turd. I haven’t made a correct prediction in my entire life so far. Not one, at least on a stock market basis. Conseco in 2009 wasn’t even my bright idea. I didn’t even put enough money into it to make a difference.
Anyway, I just thought I’d talk about how life used to be so easy like 15-20 years ago back during middle school and high school and early college. I could do no wrong. That largely has been the case for me professionally although I do get performance feedback about me being droopy so to speak or not the highest level of professional. I understand that.
Anyway my business plan hasn’t appropriately taken into account the visceral feeling of being financially retarded and having to take gut punches on a recurring basis in that dimension. I do realize that this is what I am doing and it leaves me increasingly isolated in a world where I have been hanging my hat on events that have never taken place and now revolve around the supreme court of the united states just affirming a lower court interpretation about the law that is the correct statutory interpretation of the law and backed by the man who wrote the law but is novel in a sense that we just went through 6 years of absolute bullshit legal rulings.
So anyway I will carry this pit in my stomach now for another 5 months, like 150 more days. I have been carrying this around for 2200+ days now. Maybe you don’t know what it’s like to carry something around that just is a rain cloud in your day for that long, but it is demoralizing. I’ve let it cloud everything in my life. I basically go to the beach to chill.
Anyway, it could be worse. I remain confident in the SCOTUS ruling. I don’t think that it matters from the perspective of Treasury and FHFA working together to settle the lawsuits to raise capital, because if they are going to do that, and if Treasury is serious about it, then the SCOTUS ruling doesn’t matter. Where it helps, however, is in making Treasury serious about it because with the APA claims ruling the net worth sweep illegal.
Anyway, so yeah, going around for years without feeling like you have money to spend when you work to make enough money to enjoy life is a lot of cognitive dissonance. At any point in time, I could give up. My family and friends encourage me to give up in every conversation that I have with them, and that’s been the case for years, so for the most part I am tired of talking to everyone about this. I try to be informative but my information is absolute dog shit.
That said, I still believe Mnuchin saw that the government was going to lose this SCOTUS case and figured, hey… why should I have to do the liquidation preference writedown when SCOTUS is going to curb stomp it for me, all I have to do is put all the scaffolding in place so that when SCOTUS comes out, Yellen can come in and do an accounting adjustment with Mark Calabria who understand what is going on and then the companies can move forward and raise capital.
So yeah, my life has sucked compared to what it could have been. I’ve made tons of unnecessary sacrifices. I’ve had no plan to buy my way out of making neverending sacrifices aside from a perpetual moving of the goalposts. What was supposed to be 1-2 years has now taken 6 years and I’ve dug myself deeper and my upside isn’t that great, although at these valuations it sure is, which is why I am here holding the line. At this valuation, the upside is worth holding onto this way because it buys my freedom on the daily basis and gives me that walk around money that I have been working for.
Anyway that’s good enough for now, I thought there was an action item, I don’t think there was, that’s been the story of my existence for a few years now; I don’t see why it should change now if I can wait 5 months. 5 more months on 5 years of waiting, par for the course; business as usual. The best part is that.. peace i’m done here.