Here's Another Way To Think About Your Spending Habits
Pretend the afterlife involves a judgy celestial accountant who adds up your financial sins
None of us knows what our total lifetime earnings will be, or what our total lifetime spending will be, either. But here’s a thought exercise: Imagine if, when you die, you have to meet with an accountant who goes over your earthly finances.
“You made this much money,” the divine number cruncher says, writing a surprisingly large number onto a piece of paper. “And here’s how much you spent on housing and utilities. And groceries. Now, do you have any idea how much you spent on pizzas?”
He writes down another surprisingly large number.
“That can’t be right,” you protest.
“It is. Have you forgotten how much pizza you ate when you were 20? It was a lot.”
“Still,” you say. “I guess if that’s the worst that I — ”
“Ha! That’s not the worst. If you had a dime for every time you bought fast food, well, let me put it this way. We wouldn’t be having this conversation until 10 years from now if you’d laid off the french fries.”
You sigh. “What’s done is done. I think I handled my money fairly well.”
The accountant laughs so hard his wings shake.
A feather comes loose and wafts its way slowly through the air, landing on a spreadsheet. He impatiently flicks it away.
“I’ve put together some figures for you. Here’s how you would have ended up if you hadn’t redecorated your house so often. You started off with that country kitchen, and then you pared it down to a minimalist look, and then you tried to make it look like Versailles on a budget before you finally went full-on farmhouse the year before you kicked it. So unnecessary. You wasted a lot of time, money and effort and you dumped a lot of perfectly good stuff into the landfill, too. And honestly, I have never been a fan of the modern farmhouse look.”
“Am I going to go to hell for having bad taste?”
“If it were up to me, yes. Unfortunately, I’ve been so busy with accounting that I delegated that decision-making role to someone else. I can only berate you for the cursive ‘Live, Laugh, Love’ sign you hung up over the sink. But enough about that.
“First, your cable bills and, later, your TV subscriptions. You watched a lot of TV. A lot. You probably wouldn’t have ordered so much pizza if you’d not been sitting in front of the TV for hours every night. And honestly, like I said — ”
‘I get it.’
You sigh, and then you add, “If I’d eaten less crap and watched less TV, I’d be enjoying my modern farmhouse kitchen right now.”
The angel starts punching numbers into an adding machine at lightning speed, and a roll of paper starts creeping off the desk and across the floor.
“You should have cooked from scratch. By my calculations, here is how much you’d have saved if you’d made your own food, and here is what you’d have saved if you used cheap hand lotion instead of the bespoke crap from the mall.
“Here’s your total money blown on shoes you wore only once.
“Here’s what you spent on dumb tchotchkes that you donated to Goodwill two years later.
“Here’s what you blew on craft supplies that you never actually used in any projects.
“Here’s the damage from the mani-pedis and from having your hair professionally colored every month ….” He looks up and peers critically at your hair. You probably would have made a different choice if you’d known you’d be stuck with it for eternity. It was supposed to be edgy and cool.
“So this is the color you paid all that money for? Really?” He shakes his head and continues. “And here’s what it cost to pay someone else to clean your house and mow your lawn. Here’s — ”
“Are you enjoying this? It costs money to live, you know. And I worked hard! I deserved a few small pleasures.”
The angel pauses, his hand poised above the adding machine.
“Here’s the total amount of money you wasted in your lifetime. It’s money you spent on things you didn’t really need and honestly didn’t get much, if any, enjoyment out of.
“Like, remember when you were working that first job after college and you and most of your friends were broke? When you mostly hung out together drinking cheap wine, cooking for yourselves and just talking? That was one of your happiest times, and then you got a promotion and started working more and spending more. It was all downhill from there.”
He tears off a section of the paper from the adding machine and hands it to you.
It is a large number. It’s much larger than you thought it would be.
If only you had known St. Peter was an accountant. Why did nobody ever tell you that?