“I deserve …” is often spoken right before stupid. It’s often a justification to do something we really can’t afford.
We say things like “I deserve to get this car.” But if we really can’t afford the car, we can be in for a world of hurt. Creditors will begin calling, and they don’t just call every once in a while – usually it’s daily. We really didn’t deserve to be treated this way, but that’s what we got when we felt we deserved the car.
“I deserve” usually has us focused in the moment. We aren’t thinking about how this decision will affect our other goals in life. Maybe we’re passionate about eliminating human trafficking, but we’re not thinking about this in the moment. And buying that new thingy now may have big ramifications on our ability to affect human trafficking now and in the future.
“I deserve” when deciding in the moment can be really dangerous. It’s best to make decisions ahead of time. We recommend using a written spending plan. When we create a written spending plan ahead of time, we make decisions with a big picture view of our finances. And we tend to put our money into the things we value most.
We also have to be careful to not fall into “I don’t deserve.” Living with a such a continual self deprecating attitude isn’t healthy either. So we can feel we deserve, we should just put our deserving into the context of the rest of our life.
To live our calling we need to make sure that “I deserve” isn’t getting the way of our life’s goals.
