Rispon Avenue

It’s never ending, always more you have to do, have to sort out.

For instance, I had a friend approach me to help them with some finance stuff, because they were looking to create an investment portfolio and they knew that I was interested in that sort of thing. I think basically he wanted to have some idea before he met with an accountant so he could sound the guy out. By no means am I an expert, but when you have friends that can tell you anything about something as… open to misuse by others, as money, then you make use of their expertise when you can!

I pointed him in the direction of a few good sites and said I would help more when I had the time, or he could go ahead and investigate all this himself. I wanted to help, but I didn’t have the time to sit down and help properly, and I didn’t want to help half-assedly. He came back to me today to say that he had found a good offshore financial service, and that he was going to be investigating it further. He offered to pass along what he found, too.

I found it really refreshing to see someone really doing their homework before investing anywhere, especially as, like me, the guy is busy! If everyone was as careful with where they put their money, then I think a lot of people would be a lot less worried in general life. That’s just the way it seems to me, anyway. There are things that are way beyond our control, like what happened to the international finance markets, and that is always going to be the case, but if we are careful with what we do have control over, then I’m guessing we would be able to accept easier those situations that weren’t our faults, and have a lot less situations where we could have done something differently to gain a better outcome. I’m rambling now, I know it. That’s it then, enough.

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A little while back, my mother moved into a retirement community, so she asked me to sell her home – if I didn’t want it – and then she wanted to split the money between her and I 50/50. I was pretty impressed with this, because she knows I am in a stable financial situation and don’t strictly need the extra cash, so I felt like it was a really lovely gesture to give my SO and I some extra nest-egg money.

We were lucky, because the house was in one of the few locations that was still selling well, so we got a good price and it was a really quick house sale too. In an effort to say thank you, my SO and I took the estate agent out to dinner.

It went alright, and it turned out we did have a few common interests. However, he’s one of these people that can’t leave work at work. Every time I run into him or get an email from him, he is always talking about the housing market, anything about property news, which areas are selling well at the moment, and what property prices are doing at the moment.

Today he sent me an email, and gave me a link to real estate forums… I am surprised that a forum like this would be out there, and that it would have enough activity to keep going… Anyway, I am trying to be a nice friend, so I told him it looked interesting and that I might join, and then I tried to guide the conversation to a shared interest.

It’s an uncomfortable situation to be in, when you don’t know someone very well, and their primary topic of conversation is one that most people, myself included, have no more than a passing interest in. It makes me want to drop any attempts to be the guys friend, just sort of let the new friendship run it’s short course with no more momentum put in from me, even maybe some brakes put on from my side. It’s really simple, how can you expect a person to continue to communicate with you when you are so fixated on one area of interest, almost to the exclusion of all else?

I don’t know exactly what I am going to do here… I’ve been so busy of late that I don’t have a lot of time for friends anyway, especially not ones that I don’t really know and who are fixated on something so boring! Yeah that decides it, I don’t have the time or the patience to coax a reasonable conversation from this dude. Alright, back to work now.

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