Counting My Pennies

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Oops.

April 28, 2009 By Megan Smith

Remember when I posted that I was going to start investing in stocks?

Well I did it.  I just didn’t mean to.

I did a bunch of research on stocks and picked out one to start with (I decided to do the investing in chunks – choose one stock, buy it, do more research, choose another stock, buy it, etc).  I was pretty satisfied with this choice, so I logged into my Sharebuilder account, set up the buy, and transfered in funds.  I set it up as a one time automatic investment, so it wasn’t going to happen for a few days.

I’m not sure why, but I started to have second thoughts.  So I logged back in to Sharebuilder and cancelled the buy.

Or so I thought.

What I did was go into the automatic investment page and remove that buy from the page.  What I missed was that the automatic investment page can’t be blank if automatic investments are turned on (which they were).  So even though I’m sure the page popped up a warning, I missed it completely.  And therefore, bought stock.

Thankfully, I still think it was a good purchase, just not one I was sure I wanted to make.  It’ll be interesting to see where things stand this time next year, see if that mistake was a happy one or more of a “Oh well.”

Megan Smith
Megan Smith

Megan is a 30-something government employee in the Washington, DC area. She got interested in Personal Finance when she got out of college and realized that her paycheck wasn’t going to go as far as she had hoped. Since starting this blog, she has managed to buy a house and make a solid start on her retirement goals, and hopes to help others do the same. Here is her story:

In 2007, I was a gainfully employed 20-something with no debt but not a lot of knowledge about personal finance.  It was a co-worker’s comment about Roth IRAs that sent me to the internet, searching for information.  It was then that I realized that I really didn’t know a whole lot about personal finance and that my current financial situation was due a lot to inherent frugal tendencies, generous family members, a fear of debt, and good luck.  While that was working for me, clearly I needed a better plan.

While I had no debt, I was also pretty much living paycheck to paycheck and not worrying about going over budget (I say this as if I had a real budget) because I had an emergency fund set aside to cover any overages.

Except that’s not what an emergency fund is for.

So I did a lot of research, read a lot of blogs, and decided that I needed a plan.  I needed to budget.  I needed to know what I was spending my money on.  I needed to prepare for the future.

I decided to create a blog not only to make myself accountable to others but also to share the knowledge that I gained along the way.  I’ve learned so much from my fellow bloggers, and I hope that my readers can find something useful in what I have to share as well.

Filed Under: investing Tagged With: investing, sharebuilder, stocks

Comments

  1. J. Money says

    April 28, 2009 at 2:40 pm

    maybe that was just what you needed to get you started 😉 but, praytell, WHICH stock did you buy? I bet you got GE didn’t you?

  2. Megan says

    April 28, 2009 at 2:48 pm

    Thankfully, no. Based solely on my love of mac & cheese, I went with Kraft. So far, so good!

  3. Jennifer @ Money Saver 101 says

    April 28, 2009 at 10:17 pm

    As long as you were smart and didn’t invest money that you need, I wouldn’t worry too much about it. Seems like you have the right attitude about it though – “Oh Well”. Perhaps, though, it’s a good sign that you weren’t able to cancel it. Like the financial gods weren’t going to let this opportunity slip through your fingers. 😉

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