My brain hurts!

As interesting as the political news of the day has been (what with the fake claims from a McCain volunteer of being assaulted by a big, bad, black robber who carved a B into her face and with McCain's brother calling 911 and the police department to complain about a traffic jam and cuss at them) I've got more pressing matters on my mind. I've been sitting here trying to understand concepts that go way, WAY over my head. Why do money issues have to be so damned complicated, huh? I need some explanations in simple terms. Is there a financial analyst in the audience? Please?

Here is my dilemma, perhaps someone can shed some light on the mystery for me. The problem? Currency!! In preparation for moving to the US, Chris and I have been watching the currency values go up and down. A while back the NZ dollar was pretty high in relation to the US dollar, something like .78, which was great, considering often it's more like .64, meaning for every $1.00 NZ dollar we could buy $0.78 US dollar. Now, when thinking about this in pocket change, it doesn't seem like much, since that was a difference of about $0.12 USD. But imagine how it affects much bigger numbers, say $10,000 NZD. The difference in the two rates would then be about $1,200 USD!! Nice chunk of change, isn't it? So as you can imagine, we decided to convert much of our NZD to USD. Granted, we aren't rich by any stretch of the imagination, but every little bit counts if you know what I mean, so we were pretty happy to have shifted it over while the exchange rate was so good.

Happy that is, until now. With the market being so volatile and other countries feeling the shock waves from it all, things have definitely been affected down here. Working with similar figures to the above example but in the opposite direction, $0.56 USD will buy $1.00 NZD. Scale it up and that means you could buy $10,000 NZD for about $5,600 USD. And NZ banks pay a good amount of interest, far more than the US does.

Now, I'm not one to convert back and forth as the rates go up and down. It's too stressful. watching currency will make you insane! But, with some money experts in the US telling people to spread their savings over several banks and several accounts in order to protect it if they have a large amount in savings, I have to admit having our money in USD is a bit scary. The USD is doing fine now, but what if it drops? Good for other countries looking to buy USD, bad for those of us who have to spend USD! Is my money safe in USD? Would it be safer in NZD? The dollar here is not likely to go much lower. It may not rebound for a bit, but it hasn't been this low in years and since the interest rate here was cut from 7.5% to 6.5% here two days ago, the dollar is bound to climb up before long.

So I sit here wishing I had nails left to bite, wishing it wasn't a long weekend (Monday is Labour Day here), and wishing I knew a lot more about what's going on in the financial world. I don't want to make a ton of money, I just want to know that what savings we do have is going to be there tomorrow.

See why my brain hurts right now??