Saturday Night at the Movies: Personal Finance With No Regrets

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Saturday Night at the Movies uses great films to explore some aspect of personal finance. Published Saturdays at 7 PM, get your front row seat by subscribing to The Dough Roller.

The Shawshank Redemption (1994) is a movie about justice and injustice, friendship and hardship, greed and giving, and suffering and joy. It’s a story about a man, Andy Dufresne (played by Tim Robbins), falsely accused of killing his wife. Sentenced to life in prison, the movie traces his life and the lives of others as they each in their own way try to survive Shawshank prison. Ellis Boyd ‘Red’ Redding (played spectacularly by Morgan Freeman) befriends Andy. Playing the role of the elder statesman, we learn that Red is in prison for murder. When he was young and impetuous, he killed a man. Listen to how he views that fleeting, horrible moment of his life decades later, and then we’ll look at what this film clip (2:35) can teach us about money and life:

How we handle money, particularly earlier in life, can cause us deep, profound regret. I’ve known those who have found themselves facing foreclosure and bankruptcy, or just a mountain of debt, who looked back at how they frittered away their money and wished they could relive those moments. Well, life is not a dress rehearsal and you can’t hit the rewind button, as much as we’d like to at times.

If Red teaches us anything about money and life, he teaches us to think before we leap. He teaches us to recognize that our decisions early in life will have long-term consequences. Are there financial problems that come our way from no fault of our own? Of course, and we could look to Andy’s life at Shawshank as a good example of that. But for most of us most of the time, our financial situation is the result of our decisions. If you are young and just starting out, as difficult as it is, see the long-term. Recognize that you won’t be twenty-something for ever, and strike a reasonable financial balance between enjoying life today, and preparing for tomorrow.

For us older folks, what do we do with the financial regrets that most of us have? Like Red, we can live and learn. I have some financial regrets. I regret spending as much as I did in high school and college. I regret not saving and investing earlier than I did. I regret some large, frivolous purchases I made about six years ago. Did these decisions completely wreck my finances? No. But they taught me to better understand what is really important to me and my family. And they taught me how financial decisions can have life-long consequences. The irony for me is that the financial decision that made the most significant, positive impact on my life was a decision that cost me one-third of my salary. I’ll write about that decision later in the week.

So what financial regrets do you have and what have you learned from them?

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