Harness the stunning power of financial regret
Winston Churchill: Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.
Regret over past financial decisions can have a powerful hold on you.
At 23, you may regret running up $20,000 in credit card debt during college. At 35, you may regret never having gone to college. At 45, you may regret having never started that consulting business you always dreamed of pursing. And at 65, you may regret not having saved more for retirement. In recent days, many financial chickens have come home to roost.
Regret, financial or otherwise, can have a powerful grip on your life. For most, the question is not whether you have financial regret. The question is how you harness the power of that regret to make sound financial decisions today that you will not regret tomorrow.
Here are some ideas to help you do just that:
Stop beating yourself up over past financial mistakes.
We all have made stupid financial decisions. Even Warren Buffett has made dumb investments, which he readily admits. We can spend a lot of time and energy lamenting those past decisions, but it will not help us make better decisions today. We need to stop obsessing about the past and, instead, use the lessons it can teach us to make better decisions today.
It is better to look ahead and prepare than to look back and regret. -- Jackie Joyner-Kersee
Regret for wasted time is more wasted time. -- Mason Cooley
Learn from that which you regret.
If regret has any positive value, it comes from evaluating the decisions you made that caused the regret.
Never regret. If it's good, it's wonderful. If it's bad, it's experience. -- Victoria Holt
Regret for the things we did can be tempered by time; it is regret for the things we did not do that is inconsolable. -- Sidney J. Harris
To regret deeply is to live afresh. -- Henry David Thoreau
It is never too late.
If you are reading this article, it is not too late. Many go to college during retirement, or start investing in their 50s (or later), or start a business only after retiring from a career. Sometimes we convince ourselves that it is too late to accomplish this or that because it eases the pain of regret. But it is a lie. Believing that it is too late to change may make us feel better, but it also causes us to repeat the same inaction that caused the regret in the first place. Look at it this way.
If you are 45 and considering getting a college degree, you have two choices: turn 50 with a college degree, or turn 50 without one.
There is no old age. There is, as there always was, just you. -- Carol Matthau
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light. -- Dylan Thomas
Focus on today and tomorrow, not yesterday.
Make decisions today so that tomorrow you will look back without regret.
When one door closes, another door opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the ones which open for us. -- Alexander Graham Bell
All saints have a past; all sinners have a future. -- Warren Buffett
One success can wipe out 10,000 failures. -- The Dough Roller
http://blogs.moneycentral.msn.com/smartspending/archive/2008/10/08/harness-the-stunning-power-of-financial-regret.aspx
