I am spending a major part of this long holiday weekend reorganizing my office/craft room combo. I've been purging the filing cabinet by moving permanent records up to the attic and doing lots of shredding and purging.
I ran across some files with old tax returns. When I flipped through a few pages of the 1999 return, my eyes landed on Schedule D-Capital Gains and Losses. Here is the last entry on that page.
8 oz. Gold
Date sold - 8/25/99
Sales proceeds - $1,920
This was inherited from dh's father in 1997. Value at the date of his death was $2,375. Neither of us remember why we sold it or what we used the money for.
Needless to say, it would have been better if, in 1999, we had just forgotten we owned it, since at Friday's closing price of $1,176.70 per ounce it would be worth $9,413.60 today! ***MAJOR SIGH***
Before you feel too bad, remember that 1999 was ten long years ago, and we're "only" talking about $9,000 here. I'm just saying that you might have had some bigger fish to fry in the meantime and that $2,000 might have done something useful (since you don't remember, just tell yourself that it did.) There are real-time costs that are important sometimes, and long-range gain on money is great, but if you don't have money to spare at the beginning of that timespan, it's sort of a moot point. All you can do is try to plan for the future, financially. Looking back is not all that useful so try to limit how much you do that.
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