Saturday, January 26, 2008

Physics boys and personal finance

I got sucked into the field of one of the grad student offices and wasted a sizable portion of the afternoon watching youtube videos and talking about everything from E&M to This is Spinal Tap. Strangely enough, we ended up on the topic of personal finance. I would never have guessed that that particular group of guys cared about retirement savings, but we ended up discussing the relative merits of index funds verses ETF's and vigorously debating whether a guy in his early twenties with no dependents should buy whole life. One of the guys is pretty knowledgeable, one has several thousand in a couple of mutual funds that were the remnant of his college fund and is trying to learn enough about investing to figure out what to do with it, and one likes to bandy about jargon but admitted he didn't know what all the terms he used meant.

Up until now, there's been no one my age I can talk with about this stuff in real life. Discovering that I spend my days surrounded by people who also think about these things was a pleasant shock so there will probably be more chats about the difference between traditional and Roth IRA's, the advantages and disadvantages of sticking with index investing, and rants about how people our age are foolishly not saving for retirement. It's sad how blissed out I was.

2 comments:

Revanche said...

That's awesome! I'm always thrilled to find likeminded PF interested folks. It's hard to figure out who they are without coming off as a money obsessed fiend, sometimes :)

Amy K. said...

Ha! That is awesome! As a 29 year old, I have to admit I was psyched to find your blog and realize that "you punk kids" do care about, and are knowledgeable about, money. I'm glad you've got company.