Breaking down a break-down...

Last week, while driving to and from the office, I couldn’t help but notice the amount of vehicles that had broken down on the side of the road. Now, there would usually be one or two that I would see in a day’s return trip, but last week it must have averaged 7-8 vehicles a day! While most people would only see the inconvenience caused as the traffic slows up, I couldn’t help but try and see what the contributing factors would be…

Assuming that people would not voluntarily stop their vehicles on the side of the freeway in rush hour, there are only really two reasons that a car would come to a stop. The first is that it ran out of petrol or gas; and the second is that it’s had a mechanical or electrical failure. I feel that both of these causes can be quite directly attributed to the stressed economic climate that is affecting everyone. The first is very straightforward: People, in their efforts to stretch their pennies as far as possible, are not filling up as often. They are trying to get as much mileage out of a tank as possible, and consequentially, some of them misjudge just how much they will need to get to work or to get home. They run out of fuel and cough, cough, splutter, splutter – they’re stuck on the side of the road.

While this is evidence of a slight lack of foresight, or trying to push one’s luck one too many times, the second reason has slightly more substance to it. For a car to break down suddenly, there is generally a very serious failure behind it. These serious failures can sometimes happen out of the blue, yes, but I’d say that you’d generally have an inkling that something is not right. In good economic times, when you’re relatively flush with cash, you would have your concerns checked out by a mechanic, and hopefully rectified before they develop into something worse. In tough economic times like these, though, people are obviously not seeing vehicle maintenance as a priority. So they miss a service or two, and try and ignore those worrying shakes and rattles, in the hope that they will go away by themselves. I mean, putting food on the table is more important, right?

The problem comes in, though, when your car does break down (and it will eventually if it’s not maintained – as much as we’d like to think otherwise, it’s still a machine). If you’ve reached this point, you know that it’s going to cost you an arm and a leg to get it going again. And the pain really kicks in when you realize that it would have cost you a lot less to simply have bitten the bullet and repaired it at the first signs of trouble. “But I didn’t have the money!” you exclaim. Well, you could’ve borrowed it, or found a way to make a bit extra to cover the repairs; as it is now, you have to borrow or find it anyway, and you have to get your hands on that much more.

This is just an example of the downfalls of short-term thinking, and how it can lead to never getting around to the things that need to be done. In this example, the short-term view of not wanting to take the hit at first means that the hit hurts that much more when it does come. But the principle applies to everything: I’ll start saving next month; I’ll reinstate my insurance when the economy recovers; my diet starts on the first; I’ll pay off my debt when I get my bonus – heard these before?

Do what needs to be done now: Don’t leave for tomorrow what can be done today.