Convenience, How Much it Cost?

Convenience is a word closely attached to modernization. It is something that most modern facilities, gadgets, or even activities are being attached with. The main objective of which is to save resources, e.i. time and money, or eliminate frustrations.

Look around us we can see convenience store, convenience foods (a.k.a. ready to eat or serve foods), or even marriage of convenience as common examples.

Convenience stores are one usually found in petrol stations selling grocery items, toiletries, magazines, foods, and many other small items and services. Instead of going to supermarkets inside malls where looking for parking and walking inside consumes a lot of time, motorists can conveniently picked the items at these stores attached to a petrol station on the way home. Of course, the time saved is paid with a premium via the higher price tags of all items sold at convenience stores.

Ready to eat or serve foods has its cost too. What can you expect in exchange for the time saved, especially for all busy buddies out there who wants to save time in cooking for their foods. The price tags for convenience food could be your health as these type of foods contain preservatives or other chemicals that could ruin our health.

Marriage for convenience. These are resorted to by some when they arrange marriage not for love or a purpose of establishing a family, but mostly for immigration. No need to discuss further the cost attached to this type of an arrangement.

What other convenience you could think of that ruins the life of many?

Yeah, you got it correctly. Those little plastic cards, the credit cards. Is it not convenience these plastics are being marketed for?

Convenience and safety of carrying plastics instead of money. Convenience in purchasing the gadgets and other items of luxury while paying it at a later date. Worse, convenient cash available in case of emergency.

Even worse, is how easy one can purchase unnecessary items for lack of mental exercise in making decisions for convenience overrules your mind to thinking if you can afford the things you are buying or not.

Before all these conveniences came to being, our forefathers lived. They lived without credit cards. They even cooked their food while walking for miles from one place to another for they do not have the same luxury and convenience of modern transportation. Yet, they are happy and free--free from debts.

If your life is controlled by these conveniences, think again. The cost it attached could be your life.

Remember, nothing instant in this world is worthwhile. Achieving things through hard-work and sacrifice lasts forever, especially the joy it brings when achieving these.

Understanding the Needs Rather than Feeling for the Wants

By nature, man is a rational being. It means that he is designed to have brains that is supposed to be the central operating unit of his whole system. By analogy to the computer, it serves the function of the central processing unit, or the cpu.

The sad fact is that majority does not make use the full potential of the brain. Worse, many are controlled by their emotions, hence becoming irrational. Is it not a fact that when people are too emotional he tends to do crazy things?

Let us zoom in to the area of personal finance. People who are in financial problems are those that are being controlled by their emotions, especially in making spending decisions.

What do you think urges a person, an ordinary working class buying the latest model of a mobile phoe twice or even three times his salary? Is it not the "feel good" emotion while seen in public using an iphone, a blackberry, or any latest mobile phone?

One fine day when I was commuting in a public bus, a young kabayan in her late twenties was holding an iphone, a stark contrast to an ordinary motorolla phone I had for three years now. In the middle of the trip back to Al Ain from Dubai, this young kabayan tried to contact somebody using the shiny iphone. The funny thing occurred when I overheard from the loud voice coming out from the iphone speaker which goes "sorry, you do not have enough credits to complete the call..." At the back of my mind I was like bursting into laughter thinking that my 400 Dirham (or a little over $100) phone purchased three years ago is way better than this more than 2000 Dirham (around $600) iphone. My cheaper phone is more useful than the more expensive one.

If not ruled by that "feel good" emotion in your spending, you would intellectually decide which one is more useful and beneficial. Using our brains rather than our hearts in making decisions should be the most appropriate act.

A clich� that says "that is why your brain is placed higher than the heart so that it will rule over the latter" is very much applicable here.

Have you not noticed that in the book of Proverbs wisdom is very much emphasized? The book also contains a number of practical guides on handling our financial resources. Hence, God wants to emphasize that we should understand the need and avoid feeling for the wants as a practical guide to handling our money.

God bless!!!