Art Of Money

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This morning during my morning bike ride…

brief tangent: it’s funny now that I’m working at home I have imposed an artificial”commute” onto myself. I found that rolling out of bed and plopping straight down at my computer wasn’t very productive. I needed to get out into the air a bit to wake up my brain, so I go for a random bike ride to start every day…

Today I happened to ride past a retirement home in my neighborhood, which I had done many times, but today as I watched the residents coming and going something different occurred to me.

I’ll be there some day!

My apologies if that fact seemspainfully obvious to you, but it never came inside me with such clarity before.

Why not Jon?

Good question, I really think that I’ve lived the past forty-odd years in serious denial. For whatever reasonI just never really thought that I had a future.

I realize that it is common among teenagers and folks in their early twenties to have the sense that they will never get old. But at some point they must get over it, or they would never settle into a career, a marriage and a 401k.

I mean biologically it was obvious I was aging but I just never “saw” myself as old.

Why I’m telling you about this on my money blog is that I believe this is a big cause of poor financial planning and career decisionsthat I’ve made my whole life.

If a future is not real to you, why would you do things like build a career or create a nest-egg for retirement and beyond?

Today that all changed. I could see myself in that home and it was very real to me. Now fortunately I have the time and facility to make up for lost time, which I intend to do.

I’m not knowledgeable or a deep enough thinker to know why, but since very few people have any real savings or plans for their senior years, I can’t help but wondering if this denial of a future is a common psychological quirk?