Quote from traderpro:
Nice post, When a person has their back to the wall how they respond will show you their character. Seems like you got it now from reading your post. My only question is how did you cover the cost of living and did you get burried in debt?
Personally I have always lived an extremely modest lifestyle, so my living expenses are low to begin with. I have always had a few months' worth of living expenses saved up to fall back on, never got into any kind of debt. I have been lucky in a way: For about as long as I have been trading, I have also had an online retail business, which has pretty much paid the bills. If I had not had that, I would have probably worked a part time job instead. I wouldn't have been able to relax in the evenings knowing I was making less than I was spending, so instead I would have taken any job.
My frugal approach to life probably wouldn't work for most people: My wife left me in 2004, and now that I have an even smaller place, most girls stop returning my calls once they have seen how I live. To me a nicer place just wouldn't be worth it: In order to keep a girl around, I would still have to at least keep buying her dinner, so I figure I might as well stay where I am and whenever a woman sees my home and consequently severs relations, I just ask out a new one. Like I said before, touching them isn't even worth the effort to me. I guess what keeps me from quitting the whole "dating" thing (i.e. prostitution) is the irrational hope that I might find someone special; or maybe I'm just bored sometimes, or lonely. Whatever it may be, occasionally it obviously overpowers my reluctance to pay for affection.
In a way, I have sacrificed everything to trading, or to be more precise, money, and I have not received anything in return, nor do I see myself ever getting any kind of reward out of it in the future. I figure that's just the nature of worldly pursuits: Ultimately it's all for nothing.
If I had 10 or 100 times more money, I would still live the same way I do now. There are two views you could take on this:
1. I must be happy because there is nothing I would like to buy, but can't.
2. I must be unhappy because there is nothing I could buy to bring joy to my life.
I'm not sure which one of these opinions best represents my own.
What I am even more unsure about is how (if at all) the string of failures in my personal life relates to the financial aspect.
One more side note: When I would spend 8 hours a day talking to upset customers, my superiors seemed puzzled by the fact that I never showed any anger, or really any emotion at all. I guess they mostly considered that to be one of my strengths, even though it also creeped them out a little bit, especially because I would sometimes appear extremely passionate when talking to them or my peers. Trading has definitely made me a different person. When I take a loss by choosing reason over emotions, immediately afterwards I feel (mildly) successful. Apparently, the same kind of response translated into my other job: When I remained calm and friendly while the person on the other end of the line was unloading on me, I felt the same kind of mild satisfaction of doing exactly what I was supposed to do, despite my emotions.
