This afternoon, in my fuzziness, I was listening to a woman talking about her financial situation. It was on the old Fool Radio Show! (I can’t find the archive now)! I was very surprised by her attitude to her finances.
In summary, she didn’t like thinking about her finances, didn’t want to invest time thinking about them, and didn’t necessarily see the importance of doing so. As I reflected on this, I realized there must be many people like this.
But to me, this digging your head in the sand now seems odd. So many products out in the market place, from credit cards to insurance policies, rely on the fact that we as consumers never want to read the fine print. We’d rather get on with our lives.
And yet, within that, we find that we become victims to all kinds of ‘scams’, including perfectly legal ones at that. Why is this? What is it about our nature that prevents us from really examining our financial lives? Or is it just laziness? I wish I knew.
And it’s true, I used to be like that, too. It was only when I got married that I realized that I had to be the one responsible for the finances in our house. And yet, it doesn’t matter what excuses we make, because it is still our money flying out of our pockets and into someone else’s, and good/bad excuses won’t change that!
So as investors, we must resolve to:
- not be afraid of the details;
- spend a reasonable amount of time on our financial affairs;
- at least obtain some kind of rudimentary level of competence over our financial affairs.
Once this is done, we can begin to chart out our goals, our dreams and our future much more clearly and with much more confidence.
So what excuses have you heard? Have you ever heard yourself making excuses? How did you try to overcome this? Please comment your answers! Looking forward to reading them.
Kenneth