Fin Lit – 1 & 2 covered the first two Ts of the personal finance environment, scarciTy and creativiTy.  This post begins discussing the third environmental factor, realiTy which I organize into the buckets that follow:

-Time

-The Natural Forces

-Consumption and Goals

-Government

-Philanthropy

Let’s deal with time first.  Time is a super environmental factor and ranks just below scarciTy and creativiTy in importance.  It sets the boundaries in which all the realiTy factors which follow operate. Time is the great equalizer, it rules the course of all our lives, rich or poor, famous or not; in short it tarries for no one.

Each and every one of our personal financial actions get recorded on time’s canvass.

And as we’ve already learned the plot of our actions result in our curves,  and if we’re on target they should look like the curve below.

The most important take away about time is obvious but not given the daily reverence it deserves; each of us gets only a finite  amount of it.

Thomas Mann, the novelist, captured it well when he said,  “Hold fast the time! Guard it, watch over it, every hour, every minute! Unregarded it slips away, like a lizard, smooth, slippery.  Hold every moment sacred.”

In the next post I’ll cover compound interest, which I call “how to get to the top of the plan curve”, along with some of the other natural forces.

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