Busy couple of days for me. Met with my financial guy yesterday. Went in after 2 hours sleep and felt like the hick in the city; me sleep numbed and dressed in rumpled jeans and everyone else at the office dressed to Fortune 50 pressed slack, button down standards. When I say "my financial guy" I mean this guy who for eight years I occasionally had to call late in the month to ask him to spot my account a few hundred dollars until my next paycheck cleared. Now I guess he's the guy who's going to turn my $20k monthly paycheck into a lush lifestyle, early retirement and life of luxuriant leisure. He seems like a decent sort. Not smarmy. Basically competent. Able to communicate financially with an ignoramus. Our first meeting went fairly well. I find he's a little more agressive with my money than I am; since he and I will have different emotions in the event of my complete bancrupty I think this is understandable. Still, I'm paying him for his expertise--I have to respect that being a little less conservative might be the right way to go. I'm just so emotionally attatched to the money I bleed for and so adverse to a retired life of poverty and fatigue that I find it hard to be objective. My basic plan: Save a lot early on. If I put 40-50k away for the next five years it will create a nice lump of money for compound interest rates and the magic of Wall Street to work on for the next 20 years. Also, it will acustom the Biscuit and me to a life style below our means. When kids show up we'll have some room to adjust to the new financial demands they pose. And today, speaking of money, I dropped $25,000 on a new car. Wow! I was barely able to keep my hear rate under control as I signed the check. There's always that twinge of buyer's remorse, but I'm basically happy--think it's a good car and think I got a good deal on it, $22,700 for a 2006 Subaru WRX TR. $1200 under sticker. Other considerations were a Mustang GT and briefly the Mazda Eclipse or the Pontiac G6. But they were more expensive and uglier. And maybe it's not a great idea for me to have a car with too much power. I'd love to have a 300HP motor on a 3,000lb body, but I'd also like to live to see my 35th birthday and those two things may be mutually exclusive. It's a god damned good looking car. And it has some nice zip when the turbo kicks in. U-561