The Opportunity Cost of Waiting

Three funerals in four weeks. A friend taken by bowel cancer. Another by a stroke. A third, most heartbreakingly of all, by his own hand. It’s got me thinking about life. The big questions no longer feel abstract; they feel like they’re sitting across the table, waiting.

So. Do you have any regrets about the choices you made in your younger years?

As the song goes, I have a few. Not spending more time with my daughters while they were growing up. Not making more of the time with my dad before he passed at just 64. Though I suspect parent guilt is something most of us carry, no matter how present we actually were.

Surprisingly, I have absolutely no regrets about our spending choices. There’s a strong financial argument that my wife Suzie and I were frivolous, spending far too much on travel in our younger years. Before kids, we travelled extensively: far-flung destinations that took real planning, including months on the road on extended unpaid leave. When the girls came along, we recalibrated rather than stopped. Three foreign trips a year became the norm, kept within five hours of home.

All of this cost a “lot” of money that a sensible young couple might have saved instead. We could undoubtedly have entered retirement wealthier. But the gifts you send your future self have to be balanced against the gift of actually living now. Deferring joy, deferring experience, deferring “life” is not without its dangers.

Too many of my peers have been stopped in their tracks far too soon. Cancer. Multiple sclerosis. One friend paralysed after a car crash, and he’s among the fortunate ones. Others haven’t made it at all. Then there are those still here, but whose freedom has been consumed by caring for an ageing parent or a seriously ill partner. It deepened my belief that living solely for some future version of yourself, banking everything on plans that may never unfold as imagined, is simply wrong. Balance is everything.

I’ll admit I may have had it easier than most in striking that balance. Travelling the way we did while still buying a home young and contributing to pensions was a fortunate position, and I 100% recognise it. But the principle applies regardless of circumstance. Putting life on hold until some more responsible future moment carries real risk, one my friend group knows all too well.

The future isn’t guaranteed. We need to live now, fully and deliberately, while also taking our future selves seriously. Not one or the other. Both, at the same time.

Perhaps that’s the real lesson hiding in plain sight within my own regrets. The things I wish I’d done differently have nothing to do with money or travel. They’re about presence: time with my daughters I can’t get back, conversations with my dad that never happened. No financial planning could have fixed either. They simply needed me to show up and choose the moment over everything else clamouring for my attention.

So when I look back with no regrets about the spending, I don’t think it’s really about the travel at all. It’s about the fact that Suzie and I chose to live, fully and deliberately, without endlessly waiting for a more sensible time. We got that part right. I just wish I’d applied the same thinking a little closer to home. Inflation doesn’t erode your memories, and it costs nothing to be present.