Oh Grow UP!

FACEBOOK PARTY! On Thursday, July 14, I'll be having a FB party from 8:30 p.m. to 10:30 p.m. This will be your opportunity to ask questions and chat with me on my FB Fan Page. In preparation of the night, feel free to post your questions in advance. I'll get to as many of them as I can. See you there.

So, y'all know I do this show called Princess where I deal with people who are supposed to be all grown up but are acting like children. They see something they want, they buy it. They toss their heads, turn up their noses, and dismiss anyone who disagrees with them.

You might think that my Princesses are the only place I see this behavior. Well, they're not the only people who have to grow up. Yes, their brand of in-your-face nasty can be hard to take, but every day I meet people who are just as childish in their behavior. There's the woman who thinks she's entitled to $800 shoes or a $400 handbag when she doesn't have a cent in her kids' educational savings. There's the guy who tells me that even though he and his partner make $200K a year, they need their credit to get by (even though they also take three vacations a year). And there's the honey who loves his car so much that he'd rather buy new rims than put fifty bucks in a savings account.

People who do not prioritize saving – be it an emergency fund, their kids' future education, or their own retirement – are children. One of the things adults come to terms with is that there are consequences to all our actions. Kids eat all the cookies in the cookie jar and get a stomachache. Adults stop at two. Kids want it all. Adults know they have to choose. Kids live in the here and now. Adults know they have to plan for the future.

I'm a big believer in having fun and enjoying life. After I watched my best friend die in her early 40s, I reassessed my need to defer my gratification so that I'd have "enough" for the future. The future became a much more uncertain thing. But I was still a grown-up and that meant understanding the consequences of my decisions.

When I moved into the house I live in now, the place needed to be painted and it desperately needed new flooring. I only had the money to paint. Sure, I could put the new floors I wanted in my house on credit and get it paid off in two years. That's what a line of credit is for, right?

But what if my contract didn't get renewed and I was out of work with a line of credit to pay on top of my regular expenses? How much would I love my new floors then? And how would I feel if I couldn't help Alex at university because I was paying off new floors?

I lived with my nasty carpeting and curling vinyl for 2 years until I'd saved the money to do the floors. When the floors were done this summer, they were paid for in full, no interest costs, no worries.

That's what adults do: they look at the upsides and the downsides and assess logically the best way to deal with a situation. And let's not confuse "logical" with "intelligent." I meet plenty of folks who are smart enough to know better but end up making irrational decisions because they use their "smarts" to justify an action that's far from logical.

If you're scratching your consumer itch with credit, it's because you're still in child mode, no ifs, ands or buts. Grow up!