I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Friday Flash, I share an epiphany or aha moment from the past week.
I’ve been thinking about my financial and investment management practices going into 2026 and revisiting what I’m doing.
2025 was a successful year for me financially as for many people holding stocks. I started using a trend following approach to allow me to exit positions which look questionable while holding or adding to positions with strength. This helped me get out of my Bitcoin positions earlier this year with gains intact, kept me adding to gold as it soared, and got me back into U.S. equities after the tariff tantrum. My mistakes, if any, happened when I sold out of positions when my rules didn’t tell me to do so, instead of hanging on for more gains.
Could I have done better? Yes. Was it at least a 3-out-of-10 performance? Indeed, probably more like six out of 10.
I also worked to reduce my spending, switching from Xfinity to BAM Broadband, finding cheaper homeowner’s insurance, eliminating subscription services I didn’t use very much, and improving my home’s energy efficiency.
For next year, I’ve optimized my spending even more by ensuring that my realized income will be low enough that I maximize ACA subsidies and cost-sharing reductions.
I did a Tarot reading about my finances going forward, and it had a very strong message for me: let go of past financial (and other) regrets (Death and Ten of Swords), start fresh as a student and learner (Page of Pentacles), and feel confident that you have set yourself up for long-term security, stability, legacy, and grounded abundance (Ten of Pentacles).
The piece of letting go (Death and Ten of Swords) makes me think of the move from resignation to faith that I wrote about yesterday. After disaster, devastation, grief, after your all-is-lost moment, that’s when you can start again, with a faith in the universe and in the abundance it will bring you.
But it’s the Page of Pentacles card that I feel offers the most practical guidance for moving forward with managing my money in 2026. So I want to dig into it a little here.
Rachel Pollack describes this Page as a student in her book Seventy-Sight Degrees of Wisdom: A Tarot Journey to Self-Awareness:
In direct contrast to the Knight [of Pentacles] the Page looks at nothing but his pentacle, holding it lightly in the air. Where the Knight is the prototypical worker the Page represents the student, lost in his studies, fascinated, feeling little concern for anything outside them. Nevertheless he partakes of the suit’s practical nature by symbolizing the actual work of the student, the study and scholarship, as compared to the inspiration symbolized by the Page of Cups.
The student here acts as a symbol; the Page need not refer to someone actually in school, but simplly anyone approaching any activity with those qualities of fascination, of involvement, of caring less for rewards or social position than for the work itself. [emphasis mine]
I enjoy studying investing and personal finance and I enjoy making decisions about managing my money. The outcomes aren’t always optimal; in fact, they never are. I like this idea of putting down an emphasis on rewards and social position as I manage my money. Of course I don’t want to lose money and I don’t want to fail to keep up with inflation. Pollack’s description of the Page of Pentacles makes me realize I can manage my money because I enjoy it and because I can do reasonably well at it, not because it’s going to make me hugely wealthier or get me a better social position, and not because I’m going to be perfect at it.
In her book Tarot for Change, Jessica Dore looks to another Tarot character to illuminate the Page of Pentacles, the Thoth Princess of Disks:
The pentacles suit is connected with the Empress, who is commonly interpreted as a symbol of nature, fertility, and creation. In The Book of Thoth, Aleister Crowley writes that the Princess of Disks–who is not the same as Arthur Waite’s Page of Pentacles but who does appear to share quite a few characteristics–“bears within her the secret of the future.” Crowley continues, “She is strong and beautiful, with an expression of intense brooding, as if to become aware of secret wonder.”
Lon Mil DuQuette, in his interpretations of the Thoth tarot, writes that the Princess of Disks, like Demeter, Greek goddess of harvest and fertility, “arises in her glory from out of the Earth itself and establishes her altar in the midst of a grove of barren and dying trees that her fertile presence will not restore to green health.” A green altar erected in a forest of ailing trees. If there is a more potent, fertile, wild visual than that one, I’m not sure I’ve experienced it.
Dore provides advice based on this reading of the Page and the Princess:
Learning new behaviors is a way of erecting a living altar in the areas of our lives that have become dry, stiff, or barren….
The Page of Pentacles symbolizes the way in which such living altars–behavioral choices that sow the seeds of new norms, habits, and patterns–contain what Crowley called the “secret of the future.” An altar always has to do with the temporal; it is a space on which to perform rituals that re-create myth and give life to the past. They are also spaces where we keep an eye toward the future, making faithful burnt offerings in exchange for something hoped for.
This speaks to me of making money management decisions. I don’t know ahead of time whether my actions will result in something hoped for — a growing investment portfolio — but I take action anyway, making my faithful burnt offerings.
There’s that word faith again!
Managing money is so difficult because you don’t already have the “secret of the future.” But you can take actions that are prudent, energetic, intuitive, or mystical anyway.
Is it weird to think maybe I can take a mystical, spiritual, altar-based approach to managing money? It’s appealing to me.
How do I make this a sacred and joyful practice — not a performance, not a test, not something I have to get right — a living altar I tend to with curiosity, devotion, and pleasure?
Some ideas –
- Approaching each decision about what to include or eliminate from my portfolio as an opportunity to learn more about the world rather than an opportunity to predict the future
- Treating financial habits as rituals that shape my future self and her opportunities and possibilities
- Letting abundance be a feeling I cultivate, like gratitude and joy, not based on numbers in my brokerage account
- Tending my financial life the way I tend my creative life — based on inspiration and joy, not based on some right way to do it, not based on some golden path (there is none)