Good thread.
My sister, who has a doctorate (I never finished mine), is the same way. Some of these folks don't even want to HEAR about money management.
It is kind of like an overweight person who doesn't want to look at or talk about dieting. (I avoided THAT topic for years.)
Interesting replies. It seems so far the whys include:
- Lack of (personal finance/investing) education
- Ability and interest are not necessarily correlated
- Simple 'keeping up with the Joneses' is a (much) higher priority
- [edit add]Some people plan to work as long as they can, retiring isn't a priority (yet)
If I missed another, it's unintentional.
I think Beryl hit on an important angle, and maybe the second bullet point is a rephrase of the same idea. I would put it this way: there is a huge distance between intellectually understanding what you ought to do and actually carrying out the actions of doing it. It is the distance that every counselor, self-help book, or treatment program try to help people bridge, when they are dealing with just about every self-defeating behavior on the planet.
I really think the major factor here is motivational, conscious and unconscious. People have all kinds of ways of keeping unwanted or difficult ideas out of their awareness or downplaying them (defense mechanisms like denial, minimization, or distraction). People don't want to know; they don't want to deal with it; it makes them uneasy; they would rather not face it. And so they find other things to attend to, reasons not to deal with it, excuses why it can wait.
It's the same thing you see in dieting, exercise, quitting smoking, cutting back on drinking, etc. People generally know what they need to do. That's generally pretty simple stuff, just as it is here (we're dealing mostly with common sensical stuff, not rocket science). But if it were just a matter of knowing what you ought to do, the diet and self-help industry would be gone, most therapists and psychiatrists would be out of business, and most treatment centers would be shuttered. There's a huge gap between intellectual understanding and action.
And there's another rule in operation here, too, which is, whatever area you are defended in, you will act stupid in that area. I think that's why you see "clueless" behavior. It's that this area stirs anxiety, they defend against it, and because of those defenses, their brains aren't able to function effectively in that area, and so make poor decisions.
Anyhow, I see this primarily as a motivational issue, not a "lack of information" issue. Dave Ramsey makes a similar point on his radio show. It's 10% information, 90% motivation.
