Twenty some odd years ago, I went to Catholic marriage preparation class. The Monsignor sat in front of my future wife and I mulling over the paperwork. He seemed troubled and kept looking up at me. This ordained priest concluded that the results of our compatibility testing were excellent, but he had one concern.  The man of the cloth looked at me and said, "Everything looks great except for one thing. Jeff is cheap." I was hurt in a strange way, not exactly sure where he was going with it. My brain rationalized his statement thinking people often have very different spending patterns. But as a good Catholic with Jesuit education, I decided to forgive him.

Fast forward to early in my commercial appraisal career, I would often find myself "saving money" by setting up, installing and maintaining the office PCs and servers. I spent hours and hours playing with software and hardware. It was fun and I did this for years. I would rationalize this activity as keeping costs low for my appraisal firm. After all, spending money needlessly, is well, needless or so my mind was telling me.

I've heard the saying, "you can go a day without food but not a day without rationalizing." The word rationalization is defined in various ways, but my favorite is "self-deception by reasoning" or "to provide plausible, but untrue reasons for conduct."  

An alternative view to rationalizing not spending money is simply being prudent. The savings rate of Americans (and our government) is at historical lows. I don't think I'm rationalizing, but saving money for a rainy day is a good thing; the opposite of which would be careless, shortsighted spending and ultimately an uncomfortable lifestyle especially when you're older.

My uncle always said, "It's amazing how much money you spend saving money." At first I didn't really understand what he meant. However, it slowly became apparent over the years when I found myself replacing things over and over. The repeated trips to the computer store illustrated my typical American addiction to super cheap prices and super cheap products. The true cost of replacing a typical cheap part was easily four times the cost if I purchased a high-quality one in the first place. That doesn't even factor in the cost of my time.

I think my "aha" moment came when I realized being cheap was holding me back professionally, stealing my precious time. I then had an epiphany, a leap of faith and decided to pay a managed services company to handle all my internal tech; setting up and maintaining PCs and servers, Microsoft Exchange email accounts, backups, antivirus, hosted spam services, VOIP, web site support and any other tech needs. Yes I had to spend money and I was frightened at first. However, I started to notice something was happening.