The grammar of money

That $700 billion dollar bailout… the first question everyone wants to know is, “will it work?” Actually, that’s probably really only the second or third question. For just about all of us, the number #1 question is, “what should I do with MY money?” At least that’s the question that’s been on my mind these days. To all of you who’ve been asking the same thing, I have only one suggestion to make: Spend it. And hurry. What are you waiting for?

I went out and bought a ruby ring last week. Heck, why not? My 401K lost $6000 in a single day last week – what am I hanging on to the money for? Six thousand dollars. I could have gone to Europe, gotten a face lift, put a flat screen TV in every room of my house, bought Manolos & Jimmy Choos & Louis Vuitton handbags. I could have gotten a dozen Botox treatments. I could have put down the money on a BMW, like all the rest of you realtors are driving, and scrapped the whole dinged-up Toyota Echo aesthetic. But no. I had to “save” it. I had to “invest” it. I thought I could make my money “work” for me. The mistake was mine. I believed that money could act like a verb. It can’t. Money is a noun, and nouns are what it does best. Real estate. Jewels. Cars. Vacations. Treat it like a concept & it’ll act like a concept, shifting ephemerally with every breeze. Treat it like the material object that it is, and it’ll reward you with other material objects. Concrete things. Solid, tangible pieces of actual reality. It’s simple, really.

So go out and buy that big house. Test drive that brand-new car. Speak to me, Harry Winston. Because I’ve learned my lesson, and learned it the good old-fashioned hard way. You CAN’T take it with you. And what a relief, at long last to finally be able to stop trying.