Runalong

On January 1 I announced to a world atwitter with anticipation that I had invested some of my retirement money in an energy fund (VGENX) on the theory that if gas prices kept going up my investment should go up as well and that would take some of the sting out of the sticker shock at the pump.

Well... pump prices HAVE gone up- currently over $3.30 a gallon here in Redding and since Mrs. Runalong has a 90 mile daily commute, that's a lot of petrol. Between us we're investing over $300 per month into global warming (another complementary Runalong service for our good friends in Canada!).

So how has the VGENX investment worked out? Well (as in oil's well that ends well), our gain to date is just over $2300 which more than covers all of our gas expenses... except... that we would have made about $1600 anyway if we had just invested the money in an index fund so we really only made $700 which does NOT cover all of our gas bills... except... that we would have spent $900 (vs the $1200 we did spend) on gas even if prices had remained steady so our $700 gain easily outpaced our additional $300 in gas costs.

Alas, like most things in life, this somehow is not proving to be as satisfying as I hoped!