Burned By Fire
I play a wizard (the geekiest class of all) in one of my Dungeon and Dragons games. I have her specialized in fire attack spells. This is mostly because all the best attack spells do fire damage. It’s not my fault the game is written that way. But, this became a problem when we ended up fighting enemies who are either resistant to fire damage (your attacks do half the damage) or completely immune to fire damage. Like what happened to me last week, where I ended up in a situation where my only AOE (area of effect- It can hit multiple people in a particular range) damage-dealing spell was fireball, and every single enemy was resistant to fire. Every single one. It doesn’t matter if fireball (the best offensive spell in the game at most levels) does 8d6 damage if they take no damage from fire. So, there I was, half as useful as I normally am, and I am my group’s biggest damage dealer… This got me thinking about how important diversifying is.
Diversifying is very important in various areas of life, not just D&D (obviously). In your finances, it is incredibly important. You don’t want to have all your eggs in one basket because if something goes wrong with that one thing, you are fucked (or half as useful). Because that was everything you had. The first example that comes to mind, is the person who put all their money in their mattress which was fine until the housefire and they lost everything. Or when people have all their stocks in one company, then the company goes under, and they lose everything. Basically, lack of diversification brings a significant amount of risk into your life that you should not have. Having a lot of options can keep you safe in your finances so that when (not if, when) everything goes to shit, you’re still hanging in there.
This is part of why I keep my emergency fund in cash so that’s safe, and then have my investments are index funds. But also have IULs in case something happens there. Or potentially having an investment property that offsets monthly expenses. Having a lot of options can keep you safe in your finances so that when (not if, when) everything goes to shit, you’re still hanging in there.
Yet, I completely forgot about this with my wizard. Luckily, after this fight, we leveled up. This means I get to add two more spells to my arsenal (I can fly now), AND I got to pick a new feat (an extra cool thing I can do). Said feat makes it so that I can change the damage type of some of my spells (metamagic adept feat with transmuted spell as one of the options, for those more in the know). So, next time, instead of fireball, I can make it poison, cold, thunder, lightning, or acid instead and still do the same amount of ridiculous damage. Why? Because diversification is important. You won’t catch me making this mistake again. Things are going to be much more interesting next game. š
Now, I know what you’re thinking: FOGA, did you write this whole post just to talk about Dungeons & Dragons with some finance stuff just shoehorned in there?
How do you diversify your finances/D&D characters/hobbies?
Photo by Nada Khaled on Unsplash
Well done š
I cycle between MORE DIVERSIFICATION and NEED LESS STUFF TO THINK ABOUT.
It tends to shake out to having moderate diversification: index funds, stocks, bonds, some company stock, cash and cash equivalents. I ditched the rental property and feel like that levels me down a bit but I’m not willing to do *that* again for a long while. Not sure what I want to do in its place. Might be that I want to do some income earning side projects instead of investing in yet another way. I’ve been thinking on it a while.