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Money for all seasons I: income, spending and age

This is the first of two posts in which the seasons of life and finance are outlined. In the next one, these are used to ‘profile’ and project financial health.

I have been joking that people have different preoccupations in different decades of their lives. During their 20s people are mostly interested in ‘sex, drugs and rock-n-roll’ (well, I was anyway); in their thirties, people start thinking about mortgages and children; in their forties, people worry about pensions and insurance; in their fifties they move to varicose veins and elderly parents; in their sixties concerns are focused on retirement and haemorrhoids; and after that…well, I have not got that far.

A couple of days ago, it suddenly hit me that in fact the building blocks of our lives and our finances are also very different at different stages of our lives. Have to admit that the theme John and I have been focusing on lately – the differences between generations – did help me crystallise this idea. Meanwhile, it was obvious from the outset that it is not very helpful to un-pack the relationship between earning, spending and the stages in our life by decades – earning and spending patterns don’t fit in decades; also the periods are not really even – some characteristics persist for longer than others.

This is when I remembered about the Wheel of Life. No, not the one that separates the different areas of life and is used by life coaches to make you consider your balance (my life is so out of kilter at the moment that any reminder of balance sends me into a fit of nerves and anxiety). The wheel of life I am talking about is the one painted by the pioneer of modern Bulgarian art in the Preobrazen monastery. It looks like this and the picture comes from a lovely blog called Zikata – if you would like to learn more about this monastery and the icon the link is here.

This Wheel depicts life as the four seasons: Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter. This made me wonder what would happen if instead of thinking about our earning and spending by the decades of our life we think in terms of the seasons in our life.