Jun 28th, 2009
Does Someone Really “Deserve it”?
I recently had a discussion with one of my friends who had told his girlfriend to go ahead and buy herself an iPhone because, “she deserved it.”
Similarly, this week at work when I discussed my thoughts about attending the Maui Photo Festival, namely that while I thought the festival itself was costly but worth it, and the airfare for me would not be a big deal (a 20 minute flight is not a big deal, really), housing and a rental car might be the real killers in terms of going.
“Just spend the money, Ryan,” I was told. “You deserve it.”
While I certainly would love to go to the festival (and still might), and I’m sure my friend’s girlfriend would love to have the iPhone, I’m not sure that convincing someone to spend money they may not have (in her case) or has but will make things much more difficult in the short run (in my case) by telling them they “deserve it” is really the best thing.
I’m sure we all feel like we deserve more and better than what we have; for instance, I often feel like I deserve a pay increase at work because of the effort I put in there. However, to use the excuse of, “I deserve it,” to live beyond my means might end up with my ending up “deserving” needless interest charges and the emotional drain of consumer debt that I’ve worked so hard to eliminate and avoid over the years.
While I’m all for rewards at the end of long amounts of saving or paying off debt, I’m not for the idea of giving myself some kind of “deserved” reward that ends me up in debt or destroying what I’ve spent long amounts of time working on. What I do indeed deserve is a secure financial future–and that’s one of the things that financial discipline helps me to obtain.
Great article. The people that feel they ‘deserve’ various luxuries are quite often the same people that are in over their head with debt that they have nothing to show for.
Well said. Describing what someone “deserves” and then making a financial decision about it makes sense when, say, you’re on a committee giving away scholarships with somebody else’s money. In your own life, “deserving” something should be completely unrelated to financial decisions, as it doesn’t come with any guarantees.
As a side note, I find the feeling of entitlement to be an incredibly ugly attribute. From my Christian point of view, we all “deserve” to burn in hell – anything less is bonus!