Issue time
7:30 am , by
admin
Category:
setting up a budget
The Gold and Black Friday Mania
November 26th, 2010Sometimes I get the feeling that we humans like to get suckered into all kinds of things. Heck, think about the major financial booms and busts we have witnessed in the last 10 years or so. We had the tech bubble when anything “internet” was going to make money hand-over-fist until we realized that clicks per minute were not money. And then we had the housing market when almost everybody thought you could not lose money in the real estate market. We now know that you can lose a ton. You can even lose the health of the world’s biggest economy. You’d think that we live and learn.
Not so. We still get suckered into all kinds of things, it’s just that the suckering involves different things at different times. Think about gold. Don’t you get the sense that you’ve got to own gold lest you miss out on something big? Everybody seems to buy and own gold. Big hedge fund managers like George Soros, David Einhorn and John Paulson also own gold. Even more reason to get or stay involved, right? I get the funny feeling that some or most of these hedge fund guys will long have sold their gold when Mr. and Mrs. Average Investor still hold it and watch it take the same route internet stocks and housing have taken when these markets went bust.
And then there is Black Friday. Most of us get suckered into shopping on the one big sales day of the year, the idea being that “if you don’t shop for the holidays on Black Friday, you are missing out on the best sales of the year.” To me, that sounds like snake oil: too good to be true
Let me confess right here that I don’t really know what I am talking about since I have never shopped on Black Friday. I don’t even know what great deals I am missing, but I know one thing. My life has never taken a turn for the worse nor my holidays been tainted because I missed out on the greatest shopping day of the year.
As a matter of fact, ever since I have taken down my holiday shopping and gift buying a notch a few years ago, I have taken better and better memories away from my holiday seasons. I have found other ways of making holidays memorable without spending money I would rather use for something else. Staying away from Black Friday and buying things has forced me to focus more on the people with whom I am sharing the holidays, rather than the gifts I would otherwise have given them.
Why don’t you give it a try, too? Stay away from the crazy holiday gift buying pressures and see how your holidays turn out. My bet is that you will have a great holiday season anyway, and you’ll probably be more at peace yourself.
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I am completely in agreement. I really limit my gift buying and bulk up on experiences (which keep on giving). In addition, for some unusual reason, I have avoided most of the recent manias. During the tech boom, I was fortunate enough to take some money off the table at the top and then watch the rest go up and back down! Happy Thanksgiving!
Another good thing about experiences is that you don’t ever lose them. You can lose things but not experiences.
[...] recently wrote about the Black Friday mania and the similarity between shoppers’ herd behavior and the gold bubble. Then we commented on a [...]