Killed in the long term by short term thinking

From what we know of evolution it’s clear that we are alive because of our inherited ability to think quickly and respond to change. The survival of living creatures, for most of the history of our planet, has been a short term game. Only if you can out-run your predators, and catch your prey, do you have the luxury of worrying about tomorrow.

It follows then that we tend to be better at worrying about and solving short term issues than long term issues. Even when we recognize an important long term issue that we need to plan for, say protecting natural resources or saving for retirement, we’re all too easily distracted away from those deep thoughts by immediate things like dinner or meetings (important things no doubt, but the driving needs in these pursuits, at least for this half of the species, are short term in nature). Once distracted, we rarely return to the long term issues we were drawn away from.

This is more so true in personal finance and hence need extra effort from our side to manage our finances, some of the tips that will generally help in doing or managing your finances / expenses are:

1. Keep at least an hour in a week for finance tracking/seeing the bills/checking your accounts and figuring out your expenses. Set a time in week sometime on Sunday morning is the best with family/spouse. One hour is not big time but it will save you lot of bugs in long run and you can do better planning.


2. Use good tools for managing your finances/expenses which you are conversant and comfortable with, (Send us your feedback on trackspends.com whether its helpful or not :) ). This will make your life similar while tracking or managing finances for you.


3. If you have good money hire a CA/Finance cosultants (Please check references) they are expensive but again they can increase your finance and also manage risks better than us since they are experts.


4. Try to plan for things ahead since it will help in overall finances and you can get really good discounts for anything starting from buying trip tickets to buying a TV etc.

So mitigate your short term thinking for finances with some of the pointers above, let me know your comments. And keeping tracking with trackspends.com.