You immediately reduce the audience of your blog if you don’t consider that many people have already started living their lives.

I’ve started my family, Sean has started spending more. Perhaps you need to put thought into changing peoples current attitudes, ways to reduce spending without the pain and giving the reasons for it as opposed to your current ‘this is how your attitude should start stance’.

Most people have already started, and as I stated before, no amount of pennies can buy you time so the desire the delay indefinately is a difficult message to put across.

@Andy:
“You are trusting your future not to hold so many financial bumps and bruises. If it did your savings could dwindle and disappear.” -Saving aggressively and being single-minded with career and income building are not mutually exclusive as you make it sound like.

“You would say delay your life for a better future.”
Yes i would.
However you make a great point about starting families. No one is rightly placed to say when the best time to start a family is. This is an example of when personal finances should be built around your life, rather than building your life around your finances.
For those of us without children, I don’t think we really appreciate how good we’ve got it with only ourselves to spend our hard-earned money on. I hope people take this message to heart.

@Sean. Once again, thanks for the quality comment. You actually helped inspire the direction of Monday’s post, where you’ll be able to read my response in a little more detail.

As for your mortgage comments, I’ve not had a chance to read all of those links but I will. I would however say that although the base rate is low and therefore makes mortgages seem expensive, I believe this is a very short-term view. Mortgage rates are not going to get any lower so the absolute best thing to do would be to fix the rate for as long as possible. It might seem the more expensive thing now but it will zap away the risk of a ARM adjusting unfavourably in the future, whilst giving you a better rate compared with a Bank of England base rate that inevitably will rise. The only way my plan would fail would be if the base rate stayed low for an extended period of time, but personally I think it’s too risky NOT to fix a mortgage for as long as possible.

Admittedly I have no experience of mortgages so this is just speculation: easy for me to say as I’m currently detached from the housing and mortgage market.

The factors which have to be taken into account when considering a ‘consumption smoothing’ use of credit are myriad, but there are a few important ones. Firstly, how guaranteed is any future income? Of course nobody can predict a redundancy or sudden unexpected large expense, but if you’re in a steady job you should be able to predict this with some certainty, and as always, having a ‘rainy day fund’ (I’ve read somewhere that you should aim to have at least 3 months’ salary aside in this) is prudent. Also, I don’t think anybody should ever take out more credit than they have the ability to meet the repayments on, surely a no-brainer?

Secondly, you should do a rough cost/benefit analysis on the thing you are buying. Is the opportunity cost of not having this item immediately outweighed by the real cost of the credit?

Finally, and for me, most importantly (and often most overlooked) is the cost of the debt. APR here is king! I stand open-jawed in disbelief at the adverts on daytime t.v. for short term bridging loans with APRs into the thousands of percent. How could anybody be idiotic enough not to see the danger here? The ‘best’ type of credit is that where, compared to the cost of ‘real’ money, you are in fact making cash over what you would be doing if you just stuffed the money under the mattress each month. The best example of these is a 0% deal, but realistically any debt with an APR under the current rate of inflation (latest January retail price index is 3.5%) is debt where, provided you can be assured of making the repayments, you are coming out a winner on both fronts – you get the consumption smoothing and you are coming out better off in real monetary terms as well. It pleases me immensely that all my myriad debts (training loans, student loan, car loan, credit card debt) have APRs below the [current] rate of inflation, and in fact all but my training loans are [currently] 0% loans (essentially ‘free’ money).

As a final point, you mention “that mortgage debt interest rates, the cost of borrowing, are so low compared with other debts”. Not necessarily the case at the moment – the unwillingness of banks to lend post credit-crunch means that historically, compared with Bank of England base rates, the cost of mortgages, especially for first time buyers, is pretty high!
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/money/property_and_mortgages/article5579935.ece
http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2010/feb/27/mortgage-rates-firsttime-buyers
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/columnists/article-1255584/ALEX-BRUMMER-Daylight-robbery-The-base-rate-low-long-Yet-banks-charging-exorbitant-rates-loans-penalising-savers.html

Its much more common for young 20 year olds to think that the wage they are on is only the ‘begining’ so they spend up to that wage expecting an massive increase later.

Which doesn’t always happen.

This leads onto what i’ve always consider I could write about – attitude to jobs, and finding the right career. Many people have the expectant attitude you describe but not many have the knowledge and experience to truly get that higher wage.

But although you are putting down consumption smoothing there are parallels.

You are trusting your future not to hold so many financial bumps and bruises. If it did your savings could dwindle and disappear.

Others are trusting themselves, their skill, their ability and their knowledge of the jobs market. If you truly have the skill, the ambition and aptitude you can make it down this path. You’d need as much singlemindedness as one would need to follow your saving attitudes.

I think the choice of whether you save or look for higher income (which is really the crux of your blog) is often out of the individuals hands. Your personal situation allows you to save very well, but what if people wanted families or to start living life now?

You would say delay your life for a better future. But as one example, with regard to families, the longer you delay the more chance there is of problems etc. Time doesn’t always look kindly to delaying. And time is one thing no hoard of pennies can buy you.

My personal opinion? A middle ground between your savings attitudes and looking outward toward work. An individual should not let themselves down on either front.