How do you strike a balance between today and tomorrow? This is the ultimate personal finance question that each of us need to answer. Each time I hear of an untimely death of somebody I know due to a heart attack, cancer or a stroke, I ask myself this question: life is fragile, why think so much about the future? But then there are stories of the old people who have outlived their retirement corpus or find current rates of inflation out of sync with their retirement corpuses built 15-20 years ago. Newspaper stories of aged people starving to death in their middle-class home because they ran out of money are not unusual. Life is fragile. Life is tenacious. How do you live each day knowing that it can end in a heartbeat and yet behave as if you will live forever?
This tightrope walk between the future and the present is the biggest personal finance lesson that I am still in the process of learning. I have found that the art of staying somewhat balanced between tomorrow and today goes through three stages.
