Why Save Money?

It's 10:00 on a Tuesday night, and I'm exhausted. I just got back from a grocery trip to Superstore, and I am trying to write a blog post. The past few days have been incredibly tiring for me. Work was really rough today, and I feel like my body is fighting some sort of sickness. Yet here I am, slaving away on a tip that I want to share with my readers about how they can save themselves some money. I'm writing, and I'm reading over what I'm writing, and suddenly I ask myself, "Do my readers even want to save money?"

There's something about our society that fascinates me. We live in a consumeristic haven of prepackaged lust, where everything is about purchasing power, quality of life, and the bottom line. We strut about with our fancy cars, fancy houses, and fancy purses, proud as a peacock over our pretty purchases. This, we declare, is the reason why we work so hard, so that we can spend our money on lavish purchases. Our self worth is defined by how much money we are able to spend on ourselves.

Yet, you put those same people in the room with a sale sign, or better yet, label something "free", and you can watch the previously content proud cats pounce upon goods and services as if their shiny shiny coats depended on it. We all want to save a buck, we all want to get a good deal, no matter how thick our wallets are. I mean, we'd all like to be able to shrug off $50,000 jewlery, but I think that most of us, somewhere within us, wish that we had a little more money. Maybe not so that we can show off how rich we are, but so that we have a sense of security or safety, or so that we are enabled to live the life that we want to live without stress or strain.

So do you want to save some money? Is saving money worth it? Do you see saving money as something that is difficult, or restrictive, like something that your parents enforced upon you while you were younger? What is your ideal financial picture look like? What feelings does having some money in the bank evoke? What about if you didn't have any money?

Have you ever heard about compound interest, and how if you can invest $1000/year in your 20s, you'll be better off than the guy that saves $1000/year in his thirties, fourties and fifties? Did you know that all that financial advice comes from people in their thirties, fourties, and fifties, that never managed to save $1000/year and now they're regretting it? I don't want to be that guy. I want to be the guy that somehow managed to scrap together a hundred bucks every month and managed to stick it away somewhere so I can say, "Hey, I made a smart decision, and one day I'll benefit from it", rather than say, "Yeah, I could retire, but hey, it was so shiny, I couldn't resist!"

So yeah, I want to save some money. I think that if I can pull together a few bucks now, I'll be saving myself a lot more in the future. I'm thinking that if I work a little harder now, I can work a little easier later. What about you?