Life Doesn't Fit In A Spreadsheet
If financial influencers were to be believed, life practically ends after 30 if you haven’t begun investing. Worse, if you’ve made a few financial mistakes, you’re told to abandon any hope of a good life. Personal finance gurus love their spreadsheets, plug in formulas, and show you how much you’ll earn by consistently investing in index or mutual funds. They ignore the obvious flaw: planning decades of your life on an Excel sheet isn’t a real strategy. If you actually manage to live according to that sheet, it implies you never tried anything new. That, in itself, is a kind of failure.
Money, by itself, means nothing. A bundle of currency notes holds no inherent value unless the sovereign authority assigns value to it. So currency means nothing. The numbers in your bank account mean nothing. You could have a billion dollars, but if authorities decide to freeze your account, that wealth becomes useless to you. Money has no intrinsic utility. It gains meaning only through the context in which you use it. Where you intend to use your money determines how much value you assign to it.
The number of things you want to do with money is a good indicator of how many desires you carry—and how intense they are. Imagine a spectrum of desire with two extremes. On one end is heightened desire: you want everything, which means money plays a dominant role, because you need a great deal of it to make all those wants accessible. On the other end is the absence of desire: you want nothing, and money adds no value to such a state.
Extending this logic further, timing your investments becomes somewhat meaningless. If you’re late to the investing journey, your primary objective shouldn’t be calculating how to make a million dollars as fast as possible. It should be examining the state of your desires. What are your dominant wants? If your only concern is not going broke, then you simply need enough money to outlast you by a small margin. That doesn’t require dramatic returns—just a reasonable allocation from your income and consistent investing.
This does not mean you shouldn’t plan early. Time on your side is valuable. But here’s the simple truth: you must be disciplined either in your early years or in your later ones. Discipline early in your career matters because it opens the door to early retirement. You can retire in your forties or fifties without worrying about daily expenses, while your health is still largely intact.
But if you missed that train, don’t worry. You only need to begin. Understand that desires naturally diminish with age, making them easier to manage, and you don’t need an enormous amount of money to live comfortably. Even a decade of steady investing can resolve many of life’s financial concerns, even if you start at forty.
It’s easy to play the numbers game when you ignore life’s complexities. It’s far harder when you have responsibilities, commitments, tragedies, and people who depend on you. So don’t be harsh on yourself. You do need to plan, but remember: you don’t need vast wealth to remain comfortable in old age. Get adequate insurance, keep your investments on track, and find meaningful work—and a good life partner. That combination brings far more happiness than any spreadsheet projection.