Are you climb­ing Mt. Ever­est? If you are, you will need the finest equip­ment avail­able. If you are climb­ing a small hill near your home, you may not need that qual­ity of equipment.

This basic prin­ci­ple should guide how you spend your money. We all love per­fec­tion. Many of us like to have the finest stuff we can afford. But ask your­self, do I really need that good a thing? Do I need my what­ever to last 500 years when I’ll only live to 70 or 80?

Save your money. Under­stand that if you have kids, they may not want to inherit that thing after you die. It prob­a­bly will be obso­lete then, even if it will last another 430 years. And if it’s not obso­lete, it will prob­a­bly be hope­lessly out of style, at least for three or four fash­ion cycles.

Foot­notes:

1. Some peo­ple have this syn­drome more than oth­ers. It’s par­tially a func­tion of per­son­al­ity type. I have the per­son­al­ity type that is prone to this. If you know some­one who has this ten­dency, help them fight it. One symp­tom might be watch­ing them buy a 4WD vehi­cle that can scale Mt. Ever­est, when they live in a flat part of Kansas.

2. I wrote about this before, in other terms: What once held value on this blog and What once held value on my old blog.

3. There are other ref­er­ences to this syn­drome, though the Wikipedia def­i­n­i­tion reflects a slightly dif­fer­ent beast. I’d also guess that it’s a symp­tom of OCD.