My letters to Mom and Aunt Charlotte add up to a weekly diary of my life. I copied many of them, first by photocopy and then by printing out a second copy after I got a dot-matrix printer. I wrote about my work as a magazine reporter, my dating career and then my married life. On June 10, 1991, I wrote about seeing a suburban house, noting, “It has everything we want, in a town we like. We might bid on it . . . We might be kidding ourselves.”
My then-wife and I indeed bought that house, and my letters soon recounted the calamities of a first-time homeowner. On June 8, 1992, I wrote, “Just like last summer, we are dealing with another problem. The basement flooded in places with heavy rains we had last Thursday and Friday, and then more today. We have had a pump going since I discovered the situation last Saturday morning.”
The letters touched on our struggles to have a child, difficult family dynamics, job frustration. On September 17, 1993, I mused, “I never thought I would get in this jam, but here I am and on some level it’s hard to accept. I keep hoping things will stabilize but they never really have. Having a house, medical problems . . . Little did I know what life had in store for me. The important thing is to take a deep breath and do something about it rather than let things slide.”
I kept her informed of my own financial dealings. Never a stock picker, I instead eagerly tracked my retirement funds. On April 23, 1996, during a long stint of unemployment, I wrote, “I got the report on my 401-K yesterday. It is going up $1,000/month even without making any contributions. The value as of yesterday was $68,000. Combined with my IRAs, the value of my retirement funds alone must be close to $100,000 – not bad for somebody of my generation.”
On November 18, 1996, I giddily reported, “With the market run-up (my 401-K) has topped $77,000, up $20,000 in less than two years. I have the bulk of it in an index fund; I figure that lets me participate in everything going on, and the returns beat most other mutual funds.”
My enthusiasm shrank when the market went bearish. On April 9, 1997, I wrote, “I have not been checking my retirement funds while the market is down. I don’t need to get them for 30 years, so there is no need to get excited when I ‘lose’ money. I do check when the market is up. When it gets back to 7000 I’ll see where I am.”
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