The future is a strange concept. By all meaning of the word, by the time you’ve got to the end of this paragraph, you’ll be in the future – but if you think back to that prediction, you’ll be thinking about the past. The future? It’s what to come – and unless it’s laid out specifically like that prediction, the future is an unpredictable place. That’s why so many fortune-tellers, palm readers and seers have made bank from the idea of the future – people are desperate to know what’s around the corner!
It makes no sense to know, though – it can help us plan, but most of us are terrible planners! We want the here and now, not what’s to come! However, it never hurts to have one eye on the future. Planning for all scenarios makes a lot of sense, especially if you’re a parent – your children are the future and it makes that future period much more important – even if it’s something as small as a holiday.
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Whatever the future you’re planning for – be it the worst case scenario of sickness or a job loss, or whether it’s a birthday or Christmas – you’re doing the right thing. Planning is all about laying foundations to ensure the smoothness of the process. When we lose a job, it helps to know that we’ve planned, even though losing a job hurts – it certainly hurts a lot less than losing a job without a backup or emergency fund saved up. Even if we have some kind of idea of what to do when we lose our job, it can help more so than having nothing. When it comes to Christmas and birthdays, it can help to spend on purchases months and months in advance to ensure a stress-free day. It also helps us spread our costs. In the instance of something like Christmas, or another popular holiday – Thanksgiving, for example, avoiding the rush helps your stress levels.
What’s more, there are plenty of tools that we can use to plan for the future. We can earn a little bit of cash via surveyswonk.com to help budget for our future, we can make budgets with free spreadsheet tools, and we can even take advice. There’s a lot that we can do to earn, learn and plan for our future, and we should all certainly look into doing just that. Whether something is six months or six years away from happening, it certainly pays to apply just a little bit of thought to it – or even cash – just to make everything that much easier in the future.
If we can focus on the future now, there is so little scope for worry. That’s not to say that you shouldn’t enjoy the fruits of the presents, but certainly – keeping one eye on the future is something that can save the day. Laying the groundwork for all sorts of events is something we should do, to take a little bit of responsibility, but also to gain a bit of control over something as wild and unpredictable as the future. Control? It makes us feel good – and we all deserve to feel good about our futures.
