This afternoon, in my fuzziness, I was listening to a woman talking about her financial situation. It was on Fool Radioshow! 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 are 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 financies in our house.
And yet, it doesn’t matter what excuses we make, since our money is flying out of our pockets and into someone else’s. So as investors, we must resolve to:
1. not be afraid of the details;
2. spend a reasonable amount of time on our financial affairs; and 3. 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.
Kenneth