Finances & Money

A few of my obsessions

First Blain from Stock Trading 101 tagged me, and then Juan from Millionster tagged me. I hate chain letters, but to be nice, I’ll fill this one out. However, I won’t bring the pain on someone else by tagging them. I’ll probably have a horse head at the foot of my bed tomorrow morning, but I’m fine with that. I’ll hang it on the wall.

This chain letter wants to know my 5 obsessive thoughts. The funny thing is, I don’t think I obsess over much. However, this will be a good exercise to do some soul searching.

1. Tracking my site statistics – Since starting Clever Dude last year, I’ve been checking out my site statistics daily, even hourly at times. I check my Technorati ranking, Alexa ranking, and Pagerank daily as well. I click on my little Firefox Adsense toolbar to see how many impressions and clicks I have, even though it refreshes every 30 minutes. Honestly, this obsession has been taking time and focus away from just writing good content, and it’s something I need to fix.

2. Getting out of debt – Really, is this all that bad? I’m cataloging our debt adventure over at the No Credit Needed Network, and to-date, we’ve knocked off over $25,000 in debt over just the last year. However, I am always obsessing over ways we can cut costs (selling cars, taking in renters, etc.) that don’t always jive with the wife.

3. Cars – I’ve discussed how we lost $14,500 from stupid mistakes with regards to cars. I just have a thing for cars. I like driving them, I like shopping for them, and I sort of like working on them, but I tend to break things easily so I avoid performing major repairs on my own. Right now, I’m kind of obsessed with getting my wife a Mini Cooper. She’s wanted one for YEARS, but I need to keep telling myself that’s more debt to take on (See #2 above).

4. Worrying about my wife’s safety – We come from small-town USA, and even though I trust my immediate neighbors, I don’t trust general society, especially here in D.C. My wife is a runner, but I don’t feel comfortable with her running without me (she’s so tiny). I’m not the big macho husband at all, but I just worry about her safety.

5. Not doing things right – I get so worried I’m not going to do something right, that it paralyzes me into inactivity. For example, I worried so much about not choosing the right Masters program, that I still haven’t gone back to school. Right now, I have the application all filled out for a certain university, but I’m holding back from submitting it out of fear that I’ll have committed to something that wasn’t right for me.

Well, that’s the best I could think of off the top of my head. It did take me a few hours to think them up, but now you know a little more about Mike the Clever Dude.