Canadian Personal Finance Blog

Lead us not into Temptation

No not another Sunday post, just a post about the perils of Temptation.

As I gaze upon the basket of candy a co-worker brought in (so she didn’t have candy at home to tempt her), I really think the root of most problems with life is temptation and an inability to say NO to the things we know we should say NO to.

The candy basket is an excellent example of temptation to me, since it is full of sugary treats (luckily no potato chips) that are so enjoyable for a very short period of time, but then cause my brain to scramble due to a sugar rush, my mood to crash (after the sugar rush wears off) and the guilt that comes from the aftermath of eating this sugary temptation. Can I eat the candy? Sure, I can, but SHOULD I eat the candy, the simple answers are:

1. Yes, but only in moderation
2. No, if you feel that one candy will simply lead to another

Financial Temptations

Every day most of us are availed of many different financial temptations that may be much like the candy, in that it may cause a short term rush, but at the end of it, all it leaves you with is guilt and displeasure. Some examples might be:

• Do I drive this month or do I buy a bus pass. I must admit I succumb to this temptation, but luckily the Ottawa transit system is so expensive I can rationalize this temptation by pointing out I am not saving that much money taking the bus.
• Should I make my lunch or buy it at the cafeteria (or worse go out to a restaurant). The money you save by making your own lunch can be a significant chunk of change, and you are more likely to make a more healthy lunch at home, than you might find at your local fast food establishment.
• How about a $7.50 Latte to start my day off. This one I easily avoid, because I can’t understand why anyone would pay that much for a “… lousy stinking cup of coffee …” (to quote Denis Leary). Coffee tastes like coffee to me, paying that much doesn’t make it taste that much better than the cheap stuff I get at work. This temptation I can put on a pious tone with.
• Shall we make dinner or simply pick something up at the fast food place? Some nights it is all anyone can do to even decide what is for dinner, let alone cook it (if the food exists in the house), and the only way to fight this is to make sure you either have a well stocked freezer with stuff you have cooked previously (my mother’s tactic), or you figure out how to motivate yourself to cook (what you have in the house). Any ideas here would be appreciated.
• Let’s go out for a beer at the bar after some social gathering or sport event. No it is not a sin to go for a beer after your pick up hockey game, but how much do you spend on this, and how many times you do it is the question. I have friends who have “beer pools” for their after game drinking, where someone brings a cooler to a ball diamond and cheap(er) beer is enjoyed that way (is this legal? depends on where you live I guess).

All these temptations are not Mortal Sins against your finances by themselves, but if you keep tripping up on them, they can add up to a fair amount of money that maybe should be use to pay your debt down instead?

Temptation and how to deal with it, is all a matter of self-control, do you have that kind of self-control?

At Least They Didn’t Throw the Shredder

Seems in their zeal to celebrate the Yankees victory some of the smarter folks in the Financial District (you remember the ones they gave HUGE bail outs to) decided to start throwing unshredded financial documentation when they ran out of confetti (onto the Yankees below). Luckily someone found most of them later?

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