Prevention is Better than Cure

There were many interesting sayings I learned during optometry school.  My favorite one was “Those who can’t do…teach.  Those who can’t teach…teach optometry.”  This saying was partially in jest, but partially not.  Anyway, another saying which applies to pretty much any healthcare field is “Prevention is better than cure”.  I really appreciate the wisdom behind this idea as I know from experience that it’s much better to nip problems in the bud by practicing what your doctor actually recommends.  I firmly believe that the majority of health problems that plague this country (diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol) could be decreased drastically if people took steps to prevent them from happening in the first place.

I see this a lot with people who abuse their contact lenses.  I tell every contact lens patient to never sleep in their lenses and to always throw them out at the recommended intervals.  There is no other reason I tell them this than to minimize the possibility of an eye infection, which are painful, inconvenient and costly.  Most people start listening to my recommendations after getting an eye infection.  It’s great that they turned over a new leaf, but it would be even better if the proper instructions were followed in the first place.

Why am I venting about my non-compliant patients on this finance blog?  It’s really fun.  And also I think the same principle can be applied to our finances.  It’s awesome that someone saw the light after paying off their massive credit card bills that took 5 years and a lot of stress.  But it would be even better if that person never got into credit card debt in the first place.  It would have saved them a lot of stress if course, but it would also have saved them a lot of money.  Money that could have been used to increase an emergency fund, invest in an IRA or make a down payment on a house.

I realize that everyone makes mistakes in their financial life.  I’ve made a whole bunch of them.  Learning from our own mistakes is a key and essential trait to grow financially and in virtually every other way.  But we don’t have to make that many in order to learn our lesson.  Some things such as falling into credit card debt or not saving enough are easy to avoid but can lead to disastrous results.

Just like consistently eating healthy and moderate exercise will most likely keep us very healthy, small, simple things that we can do everyday such as networking or finding ways to make more money can make our financial situation very strong.  But just as neglecting exercise for a long time can all of sudden lead to heart disease, not doing the small financially responsible things can tear apart our finances.