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I was supposed to help my mom buy a dress. I’m getting married next month and she wants to wear something fabulous for the wedding.
Last Saturday, for hours, we diligently walked the aisles of stores looking for clothes that fit her style (fun and stylish, yet comfortable enough to dance to a club in). I went back and forth between stores and fitting rooms, bringing her countless size and color options to try on.
I was totally focused on our shared mission until a cream wool jacket on sale caught my eye and diverted my attention. I couldn’t help but try it on.
Money Mail editor Rachel Rickard Strauss says she makes sure her future is taken care of first.
And while I was hesitating whether to buy it (yes, it has very nice buttons, but do I really need another jacket?), my mother said encouragingly: “Come on, you can afford it.”
This got me thinking: what does that seemingly harmless statement really mean? Sometimes the answer is very clear: if you don’t have enough money in the bank to pay for something, you can’t afford it.
But if you’re lucky enough not to have every penny earmarked, the answer is much more complicated.
In my case, buying that jacket doesn’t mean I have to give up something else now, but it does mean I won’t have the £60 I spent on something later. After all, you can only spend it once.
The challenge is balancing a tangible purchase in the present (the jacket) with something hypothetical in the future (the wedding shoes, a bigger mortgage, even my own retirement, who knows?).
As my colleague Jessica Beard describes on the previous page, professional footballers often do a terrible job of balancing this equation.
Countless players have made the mistake of living extravagantly for a few years and then having to scrimp for the rest of their lives.
But they have a more extreme version of the “can I afford it?” dilemma than most of us will ever have to face.
Essentially, they receive all of their lifetime income almost all at once, so it’s no wonder they have a hard time figuring out how much they can afford to spend and how much they should save. They also fall into the same trap I’m sure most of us fall into: believing that the times when income is highest should coincide with the times when we spend the most.
It’s all too easy, when you’re making money, to find a lifestyle that fits your income, when you may actually need the money later.
The budget challenge facing footballers is extreme, but not so different to the one we all face in retirement. We spend decades building up savings and pensions, and in most cases receiving a regular income. Then retirement comes with a sharp change and instead of regular income, many of us have all the money we will have for the rest of our lives in one go.
It is up to us to decide how to spend our pension funds over an indeterminate number of years of retirement. So what is the solution? How do we calculate how much we can really afford?
Each of us has a different attitude. We all move somewhere on the spectrum from “live in the moment and treat yourself now” to “don’t buy anything unless you absolutely must because you never know what the future holds.”
Where we fall on that continuum will be determined partly by our upbringing and the attitudes toward money we absorb at an early age, and partly by the messages we see around us.
Of course, most ads exuberantly remind us of the merits of living in the present, and few talk about the benefits of looking forward to and prioritizing the future.
The challenge is to understand where our beliefs about money come from. Then we can make sure they serve us well, or we can work to resist them.
Rules can also be helpful so that we don’t have to think about what we’ll have to give up in the future every time we’re undecided about whether to buy a new jacket.
For me, that means saving a sum each month before I even consider spending a cent on nice things. I try to make sure my future self comes first.
Antiques Roadshow presenter Fiona Bruce said in an interview last week that she started saving into a private pension fund when she started working for the BBC because she did not believe she would still have her job after the age of 50.
He is now 60 years old and still working, but I doubt he regrets having started collecting his pension.
I bought the jacket and some mothball spray. And we found my mother a gorgeous turquoise pleated jumpsuit.
As she handed me her debit card at the checkout, she confided, “I never used to buy clothes for special occasions. I thought, ‘What a waste to spend on something you’ll only wear once or twice. ’ But then your grandmother said, ‘You’ll only do it once, so it’s worth doing it right. ’”
Ah, the stories we tell ourselves – and each other – to convince ourselves whether we can or cannot afford something.
I’d love to hear yours: the stories you tell yourself to allow or avoid spending.
Rachel.rickard@mailonsunday.co.uk
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