I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about that the past few weeks.

I have spent a lot of this year with a lot of money in a savings account.

Not through fear of investment or anything but because I have two pretty big goals I’ve been saving towards for a number of years and both are nearly funded.

I have a new car goal to be able to buy a new one when the current one died. Mona the Matrix is almost 14 years old and has about 175,000 miles on her. I love her. I am super emotionally attached to this car and don’t plan to get another one until she literally dies.

But my personal finance agreement with myself is that I can spend as much as I’ve managed to save and I want to but the car with cash.

She’s a Toyota and she’s well maintained. I got her new – so other than the fact that my brother used to borrow her a lot when I was on ships and he was a new driver, so Lord only knows what he was doing to her – I know everything that has happened to her and I know she’s very well maintained.

If nothing happens, Mona may have 5+ years left. But I also see she kind of old. She shakes sort of funny and does some weird things sometimes.

Once in a blue moon I make the horrible mistake of renting a car and really see how behind the times Mona is when I return. Especially that shake.

In an ideal world, I want to buy another new car. I know, it’s a personal finance fail, I should want a newish car that’s already been returned because of that massive drop in value right off the lot.

But I want a new car. So I’m steadily creeping towards $20k and I’m a little over halfway there since I’m hoping to buy probably a cheaper Toyota option again when the time comes.

If I’d had that money invested over this past year, it would have pretty much doubled.

If I’d invested just that money in Royal Caribbean when I bought a little bit in April – it would have already tripled.

My other large savings account was for a down payment on a house.

Ya’ll got to read my house buying saga over the last year and a half. I did everything I could to make myself competitive as a freelancer. I planned to only buy in the $150k or less range. I had a 30% down payment specifically to be more appealing to banks. My credit score is excellent. My assets cover 2/3 of that mortgage.

Banks didn’t care. They didn’t like my employment history.

Sigh. Whatever. We don’t need to rehash it.

I’ve been hiding out in the Outerbanks for several weeks now and I contemplate my future as it currently stands thanks to this pandemic, I’ve slowly been coming to grips with the fact that buying a house right now is not the wisest choice.

A medium compromise would be to buy a condo or townhouse, but I really don’t want to do that.

So I don’t think I’m going to buy anything for a while.

Which then led me to deep sigh over keeping that down payment in a savings account for the last year and a half because the returns lost on $50k feel pretty “ugh” to me.

And thus I admitted defeat on my first real attempt to buy a home and transferred $15k into the stock market this week.

It literally felt like surrendering that plan as I did it – which is ridiculous because it’s just a brokerage account and I could pull it back out anytime, but it still felt like that.

And I clearly haven’t 100% surrendered but I do have a tentative plan moving forward and depending on where some of those choices go, I may use a good portion of that money for school instead of a house.

And if that pushes buying a house back 5 or so years, I think the brokerage account was the right move.

Maybe in 5 years, the housing market won’t be on fire and crazy inflated (even deep in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey).

Hopefully the stock market won’t have tanked too, but who knows?

Nothing like reworking all your life plans when thought you finally had some sorted.

What. A. Year.