The Thing About Investing: Youthful Dreams and Ambitions
Sometimes I wonder whether anyone's life ends up looking even remotely like whatever innocent/hopeful visions we might have had, when we were coming up and coming of age.
Sitting in the waiting area of the local hospital, writing this while waiting for Mrs. Denmarkguy to have a diagnostic procedure done.
If our answer is no, did we fail ourselves in some way, or did the inexperience behind the original visualization simply collide with the reality of how life actually works?
When I was about nine years old, my dad started teaching me about money and investing. From the very start, I found the idea of interest fascinating. You could allow someone else to hold onto your money, and you would get paid for that! And you didn't have to work!
It made enough of an impact on me that I started setting aside all my snow shoveling and lawnmowing money with the idea of earning interest on it... instead of buying sports cards and candy.
I was likely not even eleven when I had managed to scrape together 10,000 Danish kroner (about $1,200, at the time) and my dad and I went to bank office to put in an order for a 30-year Danish Government bond, paying 8% interest.
Henceforth, I would be making 800 kroner a year, without having to work for it!
I was barely into my teens when I started calculating how much I would need to invest so that I would be able to live on my own and sustain myself, just on investment income.
Of course, as the years ticked by and I slid into youth and adulthood, reality started to interact with my naive vision of life. Perhaps my biggest wake-up call was discovering that the moment you have any money at all, a line of people quickly forms... all of them with the intention of separating you from that money.
After all, the vast majority of the world seems to operate under the paradigm that if you have money, you should spend it. Otherwise — I quickly learned — "you're too uptight about money." And it bizarre how many perfectly superfluous items are somehow deemed "essential."
Even when I was at University, I was planning to finish my studies and get a job, live minimalistically, and pour as much into savings as possible, aiming for that goal of "passive income." Even if my starting point were to be that I could go from full-time work to part-time work first, that was the plan.
Modern society, however, does not favor those who want to go from essentially nothing to financial independence. There are so many hurdles along the way... some of them very subtle, like all the "fairweather friends" who believe you should want to do things with them because you can clearly "afford it."
Three times, I managed to build enough of a base that my investment income got close to providing at least a basic supplementary income... and three times "something happened" to take me right back to zero.
Of course, I never did manage to realize the dream of living on passive income, and I have gradually come to the realization that it is really a game for people who have large amounts of superfluous cash flow to start with, who can afford to live and not touch savings, even when their world goes upside down... but to this day I still find a modest thrill in earning a few dollars worth of investment income.
And that will just have to do!
Thanks for stopping by and have a wonderful Friday!
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Created at 2026.01.16 09:40 PST
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