Another Wrongly Judged Book Cover

It’s Tuesday already?

Man, the corporate jungle is eating my brain.  Time is absolutely flying by.   Happy Lollipop Tuesday, ya crazy kids.

This week, I decided to tone it down a bit (because my ideas for the next two weeks have me shaking in my boots – for realsies).  I took Podunk‘s suggestion from the What’s Lollipop Tuesday page: “Maybe you could pop in to the library and check out a book in a genre you never read. And then read at least the first 20 pages.”

And so I curled up with a financial self-help book.  Which, might I say, is not my idea of a good time.   

Or at least it wasn’t.

I started digesting a few pages of wisdom from Ramit Sethi‘s I Will Teach You To Be Rich and expected to hate every grueling second of it.

After all, with its ridiculously loud cover and Ramit being all barefoot and casual and the term “6-week program” on the bottom, I was pretty sure that this was gonna be rough.

But hey – it wasn’t.  And I find that totally weird.  Maybe it’s because yesterday , I just made the last payment on my pile of credit card debt I amassed in college (no joke).  I’ve been working on it for 5 years.  So when the first chapter was all about telling me how stupid I was and how stupid I didn’t have to be anymore, it was pretty pertinent.  Actually, it was spot-on.   It reaffirmed everything I’ve learned through the grueling process and got me excited to have conquered it.

I must admit that part of the appeal is the way he talks in the book.  He almost sounds like an asshole because he’s telling you the truth about yourself, but you realize that it’s only because he cares.  The book to do that to me was Skinny Bitch, and I immediately became a vegetarian for 8 months. 

Which is saying a lot for a burger dumpster like myself.

I think the best part is that I don’t have to be stupid anymore.  I have never understood money.  I mean I get that I give someone a dollar for a soda and I get a few pennies back, but I don’t get all the acronyms and percent yields and annual accrual.  I don’t have any interest at all in stocks, bonds, online banking, or retirement funds.  Every time I hear those words, I want to scoop out my brain with a tiny spoon.

But I also really want to live as a peaceful hermit someday on a ranch.  With a dog.   So I really want to see if this “save early, retire rich” thing is doable.  After all, I know there are people out there who are less intelligent than me successfully investing in their futures.  And if I didn’t make it clear in my do-your-own-taxes post, I can’t stand the thought that I’m failing at something intellectually when there are millions of others succeeding.  And the idea of paying those people to complete something for me because I’m too stupid is just too much to bear.

So maybe it’s time to give the rich, old, ranch-hermit-with-a-dog dream a shot.

I don’t want this to digress into a book review, so I will suffice it to say that I went twenty pages into this book and then dove full-force ahead.  The most exciting activity in my near future is picking out an online savings account.  Seriously.

And I already had a payoff.  Yesterday I had to sit through an Explanation of Benefits session at work and for the first time didn’t tune out when they started babbling about retirement funds.  I wonder how long I have to do these Lollipop Tuesdays before I finally learn to stop writing things off before I try them?

Maybe just a few more. ♣

Tags: 365 Project, books, Humor, life, musings, postaday2011