Introduction to my 'Inital' Life

I've been meaning to start a blog for a few years now. Many of my friends have wanted me to as well. I love to write. I find it very meditative and therapeutic. I've also had a tremendous amount of 'experiences' in the past several years that has amused my friends to no end. They keep telling me that I should write some of these stories down so they do not get entirely lost. Mind you, the 'stories' are really most interesting to people who do know me and the other 'characters' in the situations.

I also continue to build interesting experiences that I like to keep and to share. Free-association thought is also a hobby of mine where I like to just write whatever is on my mind. Basically, I do like to share my life and my views, which myself if nobody else. So I guess I'm just going to write whatever 'catches my fancy'. At least it will be a log to myself if nobody else.

Let me give a brief history of how my life started out. It'll be somewhat of a 'dryer' read, but will give you a background of what my life was like throughout my 20's. Then I can get more into the more 'interesting' stuff.

I'm in my upper 30's now and I have already lived a few 'different' types of lives in the past two decades or so. I started out as a ambitious and success-oriented person and for the first ten plus years of my adult life lived a pretty stable and career-focussed life. I have a university bachelor's degree, had a highly responsible job where I had to work very hard, but also was paid quite well. I was married to a attractive, wonderful, and intelligent person whom I met when I was 22 years old (Summer after I graduated university) and she was 23 years old. I wore a suit and tie (or business casual) to work, travelled whenever it suited my fancy (and when I had the time), put lots of money aside for 'expenses and leisure' and also saved plenty for my retirement savings. I liked to socialize, liked being active, also enjoyed reading and learning, and amoungst my other hobbies were body building and regularly playing the stock markets. That pretty much was my life throughout the 90's.

I am a Canadian citizen, growing up in Manitoba. After graduating university I took a job in the Toronto area. Five years later I accepted a different job (same career) in Columbus, Ohio. My girlfriend (who was living with me - she followed me from Manitoba to Toronto) once again moved with me to Columbus. Our first year there we legally married so she could legally live in the United States (with a spousal visa - I had a work visa). My career progressed quite nicely in Columbus. I negotiated over $22K in salary increases the first two years I was there. My wife eventually got a full-time job as well. She was in the social services industry so was paid less than half of what I made but our combined income was about $96K per year. Meanwhile our monthly expenses were only about $1,000 per month. We were both still in our upper 20's as well.

Being the 'investor' type of person that I am, I took a significant portion of our extra cash flow and started investing more heavily into one of my passions, the stock market. This was the late 90's, while the stock market was flying high based on all the Internet growth hype. I invested in more high risk/ high return stocks using a form of contrarian investing strategies. Buy low, sell high, repeat the process. In two years my stock market portfolio when from zero to over $100K (from investing $2K - $3K every couple of months, as well as selling for profit and reinvesting that money). All told the actual investment was about $35K. (Plus the taxes I had to pay on the capital gains.) At that point, with the type of stocks I had (mostly small to mid-sized telecom/ fibre-optic/ wireless companies, as well as some oil drillers) my portfolio value fluxuated up or down $4K - $7K per day, every day. But overall, I was making an average of 50% returns per year for two years.

In February of 2000, I took $40K out of that and used it as a downpayment on a $140K house. Nice 4-bedroom house in a nice neighbourhood. Me and the wife were planning to start a family. I was 30 years old at the time. So, my stock market portfolio was down to around $70K, but all the inital investment was now taken out of it. It was now all (on paper) profit.

The stock market was doing quite the 'run-up' and I knew that it couldn't last, but my philosophy was I didn't want $100K, I wanted a million dollars. Mind you I also said to myself if my portfolio gets up to $200K, then I'll sell and invest that into much 'safer' investments. But, once again, this was my 'play' money. I also had RRSP's (retirement savings) that I had been building since I was 22 years old. Now I also was a home owner. (Or a mortage owner to be more accurate.) So my philosophy for my stock market investments was always "never invest anything that you cannot afford to lose".

I consider those ten years (basically the 90's) the first part of my adult life. Things were very good then. They didn't continue that way.

Sure enough, in the next three months my $70K ran itself all the way up to $116K (which was the final run up) without me putting any additional money into it. Then the bubble burst and my $116K fell to about $45K in one week. So on paper I lost over $65K in one week. But, this was all profit anyway as all my inital investment was now into my house. This was a major "Bummer" to me, but didn't really bother me that much. I did understand the high risk/ high return type of investing that I was playing with.

Unbeknownst to me at the time, the rest of my life was soon to collapse as well. Which would kick off the second 'phase' of my adult life. That's the one that was MUCH more painful, crazy, fun, and interesting. We'll be getting to all of that very soon...