Double Trouble
When my daughter was young, it was an interesting exercise watching how she spent her weekly pocket money. At age seven, she would rush into a toy shop and blow all her money in one fell swoop, and be left with nothing for the remainder of the week.
Instant gratification I called it, and we see this with trail runners who enter too many races and run them without proper preparation.
“It is in the second phase of training when the quality sessions begin that runners often come unstuck, trying to do higher mileages while adding quality work.”
By age 14 she had learned patience and started stashing her money away in a shoebox under her bed. She had reached the delayed gratification stage, similar to a runner who plans her races and puts in solid, if somewhat haphazard, training for it.
By the age of 16, she had started to realise that not only was inflation eating into the money in her shoe box, but she was getting zero growth on it. She then invested it, together with a portion of her pocket money, on the stock market each month. Something she
