I was almost 30 when I decided to put all my money-flow on paper and discovered that all the savings and spending, compound interested or not, having car problems and being broken for a while, everything up to almost that time meant absolutely nothing for my financial future.

I guess most people just get the signal empirically, so they discover it in real time.

Now, after that time savings started to matter. But must people are completely unable to relate to people that aren't an exact copy of themselves. Even when they once experienced the same thing. And yeah, people tend to get worse on this when they age.