The older you get, the slower your financial understanding or perspective becomes. I think it is clear that we find it harder and harder to process monetary facts of life as we age. Especially since the ground rules are always changing. As a consequence, we are being invisibly nickled-and-dimed to death. There is a design of sorts at work here.

This awareness of my awareness came about by accident. Yesterday, a friend of mine was lamenting the lack of a few thousand dollars in the community chest and I suggested that a grant request be made. After all, all the money requested would only go to materials. No one gets paid to do community work out here.

“Oh, gee. I hate going to the government for a handout. That’s $10,000! It’s a fortune. It’s also demeaning to beg, and anyway, why do we deserve to get a grant? It’s too much!”

OBSERVATION: His morals are in good shape but his financial cognition is impaired. Somehow he continues to think $10,000 is a lot of money. It hasn’t been a lot of money for a very long time. Worse, I was starting to think the same way. We were both ‘founded’ in the past!

But, if you think about it…………..

“You go to the local greasy spoon for breakfast don’t you? The one we all go to in Campbell River because it is cheap, the food is home-made and the ambiance is straight out of a frayed-at-the-edges diner from the fifties?”

“Yep.”

“You and your wife have bacon and eggs and a cup of tea and you find that, somewhat surprisingly, you are leaving behind $25.00 to pay the bill. Right? And you are always a bit shocked that it is so much but, because you are an honest man with a sense of ‘paying as you go’, you pay and leave a tip and try to put it out of your mind, right?”

“Yeah! How did you know we had bacon and eggs and it costs $25.00 with tip?”

“Because we all go there and we all order much the same thing and the price remains the same unless it goes up. Which it always does. Like the BC Ferries. Like White Spot. Little ‘ price increments’ every few months. PLUS HST! They have accountants on it all the time so that they can keep up with the cost of things. You don’t! Your little mental accountant retired a long time ago. In case you haven’t noticed, the cost of things is always increasing, even in recessions (gasoline, taxes, food), and usually much more than the cost of living laughingly stated by the government’s basket-of-goods official price index – AKA the LIE.”

“Yeah. Right! But what is your point?”

“Well, you are retired. Fixed income. Your sense of ‘pricing’ is at least a decade old and most likely two decades old. Your sense of the ‘value of a buck’ is so dated, you’ve lost the ability to know what is a bargain and what is too much to pay. You don’t even know how your ‘buck’ is spent! You certainly don’t know how to comparison shop anymore. Or how a bill works. You are ‘out of it’.

“And because of that – for example – you think a small grant of $10,000 is a lot of money. Well, it used to be. It ain’t no mo’. There are hockey players and actors and criminals and corporate pigs that make $10,000 a minute! Your local government probably spends well in excess of $10,000 an hour every day! Ten thousand dollars is chicken feed nowadays. But it’s not the numbers, it is what it will buy.”

This monetary dissonance, this skewing of perspective, this inability to calculate is a natural part of aging but it is made especially hard these days. These days, they are also messin’ with our heads.

These days things that used to be cheap are expensive and those things that used to be expensive are cheap. Gasoline used to be cheap. A TV used to be expensive. If I do a ‘comparison’ to the seventies, I recall paying $700 for a mediums sized screen TV. That same $700.00 would have bought me in excess of 1000 gallons of gasoline. Today, the value of 1000 gallons of gasoline would buy me five huge home-theatre-sized TVs. The price relativity of things is askew – to my perspective, anyway.

If I buy a slab of steel about 8 inches square that is a simple baffle made for my woodstove (locally made and a crude, small-market item), I will pay $200.00. There is about five dollars worth of steel (maybe) and less than one hour of labour. I can buy a HP mini-computer (notebook) for the same price (high tech, incredible computing power, micro-engineered). How does one compare that apple and orange value-wise?

Of course, that ‘skew’ is especially manifest in electronics and modern appliances and such. But the whole price-relativity perspective has been turned higgledy-piggeldy over the years. We are faced with some things that seem cheap by our ‘sense of value’ and other things that seem ‘outrageous’. Tools are cheap. Restaurant meals are expensive. Prices and expenses don’t seem to have the relativity to one another that they once did and whatever the relativity is today, it seems like it will be different six months from now.

Even a dozen eggs has almost doubled in the last five years.

Bear in mind, too, that pricing is no longer ‘simple’. We used to see a widget for ten bucks and that was the price. Take it or leave it. Now the widget is electronic and you may need to add a ‘service pack’ or a ‘set up fee’ or pay extra for a warranty. Even after all that, you may have to subscribe to a ‘service provider’ so that your widget works.

And let us not forget the taxes, the hidden taxes and the carbon, transportation, and HST taxes that seem to be added willy-nilly. Or the fuel surcharge. I am sure you are aware that airlines are now charging ‘extra’ for taking your luggage, letting you listen to the sound system and for edible food. The sticker price is no longer the pay-at-the-till-price. Not even close.

It is almost impossible to figure out how much per litre I pay for propane delivered by barge. And it is impossible to forecast what I will pay three months from now.

Unless you are ‘in the market’ every day, it is almost impossible to keep up and, if you are older and less involved in day to day activities, your price perspective is very likely all wrong. Old people are not only subject to this strange dynamic, they are very vulnerable to it.

And, if you are ‘on-the-grid’, ‘they’ haven’t even really begun to mess with you yet. The cable companies, BC Hydro, your water. All of these will have surcharges and ‘premium packages’ and use-fees. In addition to the licenses and taxes and other ‘niggling’ charges that add a few percentage points.

You can thank the ‘convenience’ of digital money for much of this. This will blow your mind: most banks don’t even carry much cash anymore. Ya wanna rob somebody? Good luck. The money is all electronic and, as such, all the extra costs are levied without you even knowing.

And you wonder why it is getting harder and harder to make ends meet?

I’m just sayin’………….