The irony that you can only really engage a financial advisor when you have enough money to pay for one isn’t lost on me. When I look back at our hunger years, we made all kinds of stupid decisions as we struggled to make ends meet. But now times have changed we’re finally able to rely on an expert to help us navigate the choppy waters from here to retirement and beyond.
I love our advisor. She makes house calls; we enjoy a few glasses of wine and appetizers and even Grumpy is happy by the time she leaves. As I’ve written before, he really is a numbers guy. So, where my takeaway from each meeting is how much fun we’ve just had, his is more about producing a new set of figures for a spreadsheet.
Naturally there’s always some sort of homework to be done afterwards. Grumpy scribbles numbers on a scrap of paper while I accidentally throw it out with all the other wrappers from the feast.
“You know you really should get your head around all this stuff,” he complained after our last party, I mean business meeting. “I might not be here one day, then what would you do?”
“You’re going on vacation without me?” I whimpered. “Can you do that if it’s not in the plan?”
The plan, I have learned, is everything. Initially the idea of planning anything apart from when to do the next load of laundry seemed alien to me. But then I learned “if you fail to plan, you plan to fail” from an old self-help book I’d forgotten to read. We started to have conversations about paying our future selves.
Personally, I’m excited to meet our future selves. Instead of worrying about money all the time like we do, they’re going to be content in the knowledge that there’s always something to fall back on. Not only will they have money for emergencies, but they’ll be traveling around the world, throwing out charitable donations like confetti at a wedding and sending their grandchildren to Ivy League colleges.
They’ll be able to afford three courses in a restaurant, shop in stores that don’t sell clothes big enough for them and have plastic surgery whenever they want. They’re going to be really fun people without a care in the world.
The only problem with this plan is our game of Back to the Future isn’t going to have a happy ending unless our current selves start putting in the work. What that means is looking at what we spend and start saving. It appears it would have been preferable if we’d had started to do this a little while ago, by which I mean around 1987.
“So, let’s see if I’ve got this right,” I said to Grumpy after our last party, I mean wake. “We just need to take our money and assign it to different accounts.”
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“Exactly,” Ebenezer Decent said. “No more going out unless it’s carefully planned. There’s other ways we can save too, like turning the cold air off at night, downsizing the house…”
“Downsizing again!” I cried. “We’ve just done that!”
“I don’t mean now, maybe our future selves might want to, though,” he replied. “After all, this place is only about 100 square foot smaller than our last house.”
“Well, my future self is never moving again!” I declared. “We haven’t even got rid of all the empty packing boxes yet.”
“Good point,” Grumpy said. “Maybe we can sell them.”
“Who’s going to buy a crumpled old box?” I said about 10 decibels louder than my plan dictated. “We don’t have to take things to extremes, otherwise our future selves are going to be divorced.”
Sharing a tea bag later, my current self decided to take a more positive attitude with Grumpy by working out which accounts we needed.
“Let’s see. We need an emergency savings account, a travel account, a health savings account and a home repair account.”
I was starting to get excited.
“How about an emergency travel account; that could be very useful,” I said. “Home repairs could cover all the work I still want to do to our (nearly) downsized house.”
“Well, you can’t do them all at once,” Grumpy said.
When did he suddenly become so sensible with money? I missed our past selves. We were even more fun than our future selves because we didn’t have anyone else but ourselves and our kitten Kipper to worry about.
“We’d have to save the money in the home repairs account first, and then we could decide on a priority list.”
“They’re all a priority, if you put it like that,” I said. “We could save a fortune in cleaning bills over the years if we just ripped out the brand-new cream carpet we inherited with the house and replaced it with hardwood now. Plus, I hardly ever use the health savings account.” (If you don’t count the thousands I’ve handed over to my dentist in the past 14 years.) “If I promise not to get sick, can I take some of the money out and replace the fireplace?”
“Only if breaks your foot while you’re doing it,” Grumpy sneered.
“Now you’re just being difficult,” I snapped. “Next you’re going to tell me the travel account isn’t for vacations, it’s to pay for train tickets to Chicago.”
Sometimes I wonder if we’ll ever have future selves. We won’t need to take care of our home or each other because we’ll be too busy passing the buck.
Hilary Decent is a freelance journalist who moved from England to Naperville in 2007.