My Big Decision

Two back to back very positive days thanks to Obama and I'm right back in the groove. The psyche is totally different now. Hopefully tomorrow stays the same b/c I'm going to be up for a while.

I find it funny that depending on how reference it, a monetary amount either sounds like a lot or a very little. It could totally due to the fact that I haven't had to buy a lot of things before. I would be the world's worst contestant on The Price is Right just FYI. For example, I had no idea that a washing machine or a dryer cost so much. At the moment I'm struggling with this opportunity that I came across to own a share of a bar. It's uh... let's just say 5 digits (again, I'm a little uncomfortable publishing absolute numbers out to the WWW). If you think about it, it's really not that much with a good solid month of trading. On the other hand it's no chump change, either.

The bar in discussion is The Parish down on 6th Street. I personally have visited the place on numerous occasions. There's a Cajun restaurant downstairs and I don't care for it. Now that I know the management is making changes to sell/re-do the restaurant portion I feel a lot more comfortable with the idea of putting my money there. I got a few financial statements and I'm going to do some Excel work later. Given that this is my first major investment I'm having some reservations. The worst case scenario is that I lose all of my investment... the slightly more likely and still not very favorable scenario is that I don't see a return on my money for a long while.

Now I'm a die hard music fan. The idea of owning a piece of one of my favorite Austin venues is fantastic. The ability to go to all the shows for free and get a 25% discount on my tab is flat out awesome, not to mention meeting the band. At the end of the day, it's still a business decision no matter how much I want to romanticize about it. If I want to get a return on my money by just going to free shows I'd have to go to about 1,000 shows (LOL!!). Say that if I go to two concerts a month, I'd break even in about 3 and a half years. Honestly, I don't even know where else to put my money as far as investing or retirement planning goes since it's not technically "earned" income by IRS' definition so we can't really do IRA or SEP. I want to say our real option is CD's and life insurance even though life insurance has a good chunk of fees.

I'm going to crunch some numbers and see if it's a viable business and what the P/L would look like after the some of the changes that's going to happen.