I am very excited to be participating in Women’s Money Week 2012. I am breaking from my usual posting schedule to post everyday this week in support of this project. Today’s post is about Saving and Investing. Click here for more posts on this topic.

In high school government class, we had to pick some stocks and follow them for a semester in order to see (kind of) how the stock market worked. I had to do a similar project in one of my MBA classes.  Because I’m an excel geek, for that class, I created all sorts of charts that showed how my stocks were doing over time, compared to each other, compared to the market at large, etc. I found it fascinating. But I don’t have an investment account anywhere. The closest I’ve ever come to “investing” money was to put it in a CD.

That’s not to say I don’t have investments. I have an 401(k) that became and IRA, and I have my current 403(b). I know that technically, those are investments, but I don’t think of them as such. My 403(b) is all in one of those targeted funds. However, because I have a pretty high risk tolerance, it is in a fund targeted for 5 years after my expected retirement date. (I’m a real wild child, I know.)

The old 401(k) cum IRA is where my risk tolerance is really visible. A couple of years ago I changed it from being in safe money market account to be purely invested in foreign real estate markets (or something like that). It was only a couple thousand anyway, so I figure if I lose it all, it won’t make that much of a difference in my retirement, but if it goes really well, it might pay for one full month in a nursing home. (That’s probably a bad joke that doesn’t make sense to anyone other than me. We have learned that one month in a nursing home costs upwards of $7,000.)

There is a part of me that want to be an investor. I have joked that C should become a day trader. It just sounds fascinating, but we’re not there right now. Our savings- and we do save quite a bit per month, is all pretty much earmarked for things like paying for C to be in school, car repairs, home improvement, vet bills, and adoption. So yes, we save, but the money is all pretty much spoken for.

Our only true long term savings are the retirement accounts. (I should note that C also has an old 401(k) from the company he got laid off from. I have no idea what mix of investments he has in it.) I keep saying that once C gets a job, or at least stops costing us $850/month, we can put all of that money into a mix of retirement savings and other projects. But with plans to bring a child in to our family, there’s a good chance that money will go elsewhere.

In order to ensure we have something in our retirement (because I do not believe social security will be there when we retire, not am I certain it should be- but that’s a different post), I do one “good” thing. No, it’s not max out my retirement savings. I cannot afford to do that. What I have done, though, is set my savings to go up by 1% automatically every year. It happens in April, which is the same month raises go into effect in my company.

That means that come next month, I’ll be contributing 6% of my income to my retirement account. (Max company match came at 4%.) At the same time, I’ll get a raise of roughly 3%. What this means is that I still get the joy of seeing a the bigger paycheck that comes with getting a raise (emotionally this matters to me), but at the same time, I’m increasing my retirement savings in a way where I never see the money and therefore never miss it.

Someday I’ll open an investment account. At least that’s what I like to tell myself. But for now, I’ll stick with savings for the expenses I can see coming up and putting money in my retirement account. We have still have 30+ years before retirement, so I am going with the long view that while stocks are down now, they will jump back up and we will see significant gains by the time we retire.

Perhaps I should be doing more to ensure a better retirement, but that’s what I have the energy for right now. And something is better than nothing. The perfect is the enemy of the good, and if I did nothing, waiting until I had the time and energy to do more, then we’d be really behind the ball. For now, something is better than nothing.