In/out urger

Question: It has been very difficult for me to save. I am always discouraged when I am about to start saving. It is like the game of Snakes and Ladders where I always land on the snake’s head and end up falling back on square one. Got any suggestions? Asked at “Ask a Friend, Ask Efren” free service at www.personalfinance.ph, SMS, Viber, Twitter, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook

Answer: A water tank will fill via the inflow pipe alone for 57 minutes and empty by outflow pipe alone for 75 minutes. How long will it take to fill the tank if both inflow and outflow pipes are fully opened? I hated those math problems. Why even bother solving them? Just close the outflow pipe and fill up the tank.

Yet, if we look closer, many of life’s problems can be simplified by looking at it as an inflow and outflow problem.

I recently renewed my goal for the nth time of taking 10,000 steps a day because in a recent picture, I looked like I was ready to pop out twins. Why 10,000 steps? Well, I realized that with the pandemic confining me to work in front of a computer for most of the day, the most exercise I was getting was finger calisthenics.

The Good Lord had perfectly designed our body to be highly active while we are young and still capable of gorging on a 25-course buffet. But as we get older and become less active (for a myriad of reasons), our appetite was also designed to diminish.

Yet, being the imperfect humans that we are, even as we get older, we tend to tip the scale toward adding more calories than we can burn. In other words, it is the inflow versus outflow problem once more.

A former co-worker once told me that he could not figure out why when he was younger, he was not only able to save but he was even able to invest. Now that he is much older, he claims he is faced with the occasional budget shortfall. I simply told him that when he was younger, he did not have mouths to feed. Now he has a lot. Again, the inflow versus outflow problem.

Many of life’s challenges seem daunting. And we only need to translate them into simple terms for us to get a better handle on them. As a kid, Elon Musk was so afraid of the dark. But being the science genius that he is, he came to understand that darkness was just the absence of photons. Then he thought that it would be silly being afraid of a lack of photons. After that, he was not afraid of the dark anymore.

Saving is the same thing. You just need to let more money in and less money out. When you see it as that simple, saving will be much easier. And to be better motivated, approach the problem not as saving a small percentage of your income but living off a larger percentage of your income. Saving will be all the more pleasing to you.

By the way, if you were wondering about the solution to our earlier math problem, it is 237.5 minutes.

Stay safe and healthy. INQ