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 he cash had materialized during the George Bush administration, those dark ages before the dot-com era, a time when money had to be earned the old-fashioned way. My wife and I saved it by being cheapskates. A rented apartment. Embarrassing, collegiate-style furniture. We ate in unless an out-of-town relative with a credit card was in town. When a second job teaching a college course forced the purchase of a second car, I found an 11-year-old thing for $800 that I could keep running by threatening it in Italian.
That is how we managed to put $17,000 into our savings account. For the first time in my life, I had a positive net worth. I was liquid. I was home free, or so I believed. But just as I thought I was crossing into the end zone to score seventeen thousand points, the game changed. Now that I had some money, what exactly was I supposed to do with it? That was when the hives started.
I imagined a financial adviser’s eyes lighting up at the sight of this little nest egg. Seventeen thousand dollars has “home mortgage down payment” written all over it. Cobble together another $2,000 and we would have had 10 percent down on perhaps a tool shed, given the real estate prices in northern California at that time. A house would bring a tax deduction. It would mean respectability. It would be the mark of a grown-up.
If I had seen fit to consult a financial adviser, I would have been asked about debt. We had very little debt. Every month our credit cards were paid down to zero and the student loans were nearly done, so debt relief wasn’t a pressing need.
The adviser might have urged me to save some taxes by opening up an Individual Retirement Account. That is, saving it for old age. But at that time the nonprofit radio station where I worked had no pension plan. I had no broker. I knew one guy who was an arbitrageur who boasted he was a personal acquaintance of Ivan Boesky. But at the time I wasn’t completely clear on what an arbitrageur did.
I did know one thing. I wanted to be a foreign correspondent when I grew up.
So my wife and I quit our jobs, sold the cars, moved with our infant son to London and blew the money in nine months.
But as our last few pence were circling the drain, a process hastened by one of the lousiest exchange rates for the dollar since the demise of the gold standard, something happened. Just about the time of the naked Belgian accountant assignment in France, other people’s money started coming in to my little overseas bureau. The enterprise blossomed, and after three years it was possible to argue that the overseas lark was a good investment. We were enriched by the travel, the chance to break old patterns and try a new way of life. It was instrumental in getting the job I have now.
This is my rationalization, anyway.
It is very easy to rationalize spending money. But the fact is, I can’t prove that moving my family to London was the right thing to do with it. In other words, buyer’s remorse has set in.
 think a lot about the wisdom of blowing our nest egg the way we did, because in my job now I am surrounded by such responsible people. I spend much of my day exchanging knowledge with eminent men and women of business and finance. Talking with two or three economists and analysts a day has an effect. One day who should walk into my office but someone as confident about what do with money as the naked accountant. It happened to be a U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, Robert Rubin, in the flesh. Well, not flesh. He was wearing a suit that probably cost more than another trip to London for my whole family, and he wanted to talk about investment capital working to help inner cities. How was I to look a guy like Secretary Rubin in the eye and admit that I once flushed away on some European fling seventeen thousand of the very dollar bills that bear his signature? I was living out a version of the Mel Brooks film Young Frankenstein. It was as though I spent much of my life menacing the villagers, then in some kind of twisted lab experiment, I exchanged my brain with an eminent financier. In the final scene I was the monster, propped up in bed next to Madeleine Kahn, reading the Wall Street Journal through banker’s spectacles.
My transformation into Homo capitalis was nearly complete. Plugged in as I now was, I should have had all the answers. I consumed it all: live data pumped into my hands still warm from the market; electronic retrieval of nearly every English-language periodical on earth; correspondents in world hot spots just a button away; phone numbers for Wall Street sources that even their mistresses didn’t have. One would think the wisdom about what to do with money must have been hidden in this ocean of information somewhere, if only I could find it. And there is no doubt that this tidal wave of information gave me a good handle on the state of the economy, the direction of interest rates, and the ability to make the occasionally decent call when it came to picking stocks. But months of pointing and clicking yielded more data, more questions, and not much in the way of synthesis and no useful answer to the question of what should I do with the proceeds, should I ever really score on a stock. It had become obvious to me that a piece of my education was still missing. But I couldn’t just go. I needed a sign.
 ne day something terrifying happened at work that would be the catalyst that would push me out the door on my pilgrimage. With about a minute and a half to go before airtime, I was walking toward the studio, giving a script about the day’s financial news a final, preflight check.
“While the Dow was in the dumps,” the script read, “the gnostic was doing better, with the gnostic composite index rising 1.2 percent.... A gnostic trader is quoted as saying, ‘Everywhere investors look, they see reasons to buy.’ ”
I paused in midstep, about to recuse myself from further broadcasting duties that day on the grounds that I was losing my mind.
Did it really say “gnostic”?
I blinked twice and fearfully shuffled back to that page again, praying I would find instead the word “Nas-daq,” the electronic stock market run by the National Association of Securities Deal-ers, the NASD. But it did not say Nasdaq. Settled before the microphone, in the remaining moments left before the show’s opening gong, I was forced to go on a furious hunting expedition, crossing out as many gnostics as I could find.
“Thirty seconds,” the director said into my headphones.
“What does ‘gnostic’ mean?” I asked, pressing the intercom button. The producer’s eyes widened in panic.
“Number one, I don’t know. Number two, you’ve got ten seconds. Number three, forget gnostic, they’ll think you mean Nasdaq.”
Greek isn’t listed on my résumé as one of my languages, but I managed to recall that gnostic has something to do with knowledge, maybe self-knowledge. Somebody must be trying to tell me something with this gnostic thing, but what? It occurred to me that I could study all I wanted about money and how it works, but until I knew myself, I would never understand what to do with it.
The on-air light glowed red.
A forensic reconstruction of the events leading up to what has come to be known as the Gnostic Incident concluded it was “pilot error.” An intern had thought he was doing me a favor by running an electronic spell checker on the script displayed on my computer screen prior to its posting on our Internet site. WordPerfect’s spell checker did not recognize the word “Nasdaq.” The spell checker had taken it upon itself to make the substitution. Gnosis does mean knowledge, but the kind of intuitive knowledge that is more at home around the word “insight” than it is around the words “curriculum” and “training.” It is about coming to an understanding of yourself and then using that kind of knowledge to help interpret what is going on. It was the sign.
I concluded that it was time to get out and Do the Knowledge, just as we like to say we “Do the Numbers” on the radio program.
David Brancaccio hosts “Marketplace,” public radio’s popular business program produced at USC. From his book Squandering Aimlessly, copyright © 2000 by David Brancaccio. Re-printed by permission of Simon & Schuster Inc.
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