Comments on: Which morals are most useful for personal finance?

By: Moneymonk

Moneymonk — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 17:44:43 +0000

” I don’t want to work 80 hour weeks or take business risks just to be rich”

love it

I think once a person reach contentment, they can relax

The problem is that no one ever have “enough”

By: Chad @ Sentient Money

Chad @ Sentient Money — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 12:32:39 +0000

Morally, I fall into the postmodenistic, as I can’t stand hypocrites.

Financially, I would have to define myself as Victorian. As, I like big goals for this aspect.

By: Philip Brewer

Philip Brewer — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 20:43:00 +0000

It seems pretty context dependent to me.

For example, it’s one thing for you to set a high goal for yourself, accepting that you might fall short.

For someone else to do so is another thing all together. For example, I’m sure you’d be very annoyed if you hired a contractor to build you a little 2-bedroom bungalow, only to have the contractor decide to “strive” to build you a cathedral–and fall short, leaving you with a great foundation and some very expensive copper roofing over a rickety shack on top, because (no matter how he strove) there wasn’t enough money.

By: matt g

matt g — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 15:41:20 +0000

I don’t really think morals apply to personal finance goals the way you set it up. Morals might be viewed as providing a structure to limit hedonism (i.e. it’s not viewed as bing okay to kill someone to take his/her goods, etc). Morals seem to me to be much less about achieving goals than imposing some limits and order on otherwise selfish actors. As far as setting goals, different techniques work better for different people, but I’m actually in the same camp as you. I don’t see how it translates to morals, however. You said yourself that your view applies “where success can be quantified,” and that’s precisely where the disagreement lies between the two moral systems you outlined.

Not that the conclusions in the piece weren’t interesting, but I hate to see specialized language used in ways it wasn’t intended.