Living Your Life For The Present
26 October 2006It’s a common excuse that people use to rationalize why they aren’t putting away any money for the future – and this post over at No Limits Ladies debunks it. The money quote about how you should approach this:
“This is not an all or nothing situation. Every bonus or raise I receive is split between the young lady (marvelous moi) and the old lady (marvelous moi in the distant future).”
Hopefully everyone understands the excuse is wrong on some level, but then again people do a lot of things that they know are bad for them later on in life. Smoking, for example, costs you on average six or seven years off your life span, but people do it anyway – often they say they’d rather be happy young than have a few extra years when old. But it also speeds up the aging process, causing premature wrinkling. According to this site, frequent smokers look about twenty years older when they hit the forties and fifties. Tanning beds do pretty much the same thing – aging your skin rapidly and giving you a big risk of skin cancer. It’s probably about as dangerous as cigarettes – but people use the same rationalization, or don’t think about it: they want to have fun when they’re young. That they could look like they’re 60 when they hit 40 is something they don’t face until later on – and it’s a risk, not a certainty.
It’s things like these that suggest it’s not just that people have problems managing money – because my guess is that the same people who don’t save tend to be the same people who do other things that are really bad ideas in the long run. It’s not logical – as No Limits Ladies points out, why ever do anything if you don’t care about the long run? Why have a kid or buy a house or not run out into traffic every morning? Odds are you’re going to survive and are going to have to deal with the consequences of the decisions you make today. And some of those are pretty scary.
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