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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I'm listening to Diane Rehm right now and she is talking to an expert on Alzheimer's. She asked him what people should do to prepare for the possibility that oneself or a loved one might get Alzheimer's.  The answer: save as much money as you can now. He said many people are not saving enough.

End of life care is very expensive. A vacation now might be nice, but being able to provide for your own care in retirement is priceless, as they say. My husband and I do not want to be burdens on our children, so we save our money now so that we can be sure of good health care in the future. We feel that this is our responsibility and we do not want to have to rely on others.

So our priorities are college for our kids and then retirement savings for ourselves. Vacations are low on the priority list. 
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On the flip side - you could die at 40 like a friend of mine.  That in itself made me re-prioritize traveling and experiencing life.  I'm not going crazy but I am planning trips instead of just putting them off.[/quote]

Sure, that could happen, but statistically it is unlikely. I have a neighbor whose elderly father recently passed away. His mother is still alive and the adult children have been helping her to adjust. In going over her finances with her, they found out that she not only has no money, but she is seriously in debt. The kids thought the parents were wealthy: they had lived in a large beautiful house in a great school district, college had been fully paid for with no student loans, and the family had gone on multiple vacations every year growing up. It turns out that at some point some investments had gone bad but the parents had gone on living the same way for years, taking out equity lines of credit and using credit cards. The kids were shocked. They all said they would have been happy to give up all the vacations and live in a smaller house if they had only known. Their mother will now have to live a few months each year in each child's house because she cannot afford her own place, but this is not the way she had expected to live her retirement years.

Maybe this is an extreme example, but I'd rather save my money now for the far future. My kids know that we are prioritizing their educations and our care in our old age. They will all graduate from college without loans and even get help with graduate school from us and they will not have to worry about our housing and care when we grow old. 
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I'd rather find a balance between saving for the future and enjoying the present.  [/quote]

Would you be okay with being dependent on others for care for the last ten to twenty years of your life? It is already more and more common for people to live into their eighties and nineties and will become even more common in the future. What if you can't afford to live the way you would like to during those years? 
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NP, but making my life a joyless slog in the meantime, and not giving my kids the experiences I can currently afford, are not things I want either. There can be a balance. I think  a lot people get wrapped up in this sever anxiety about the future. Yes, saving is important, but so is LIVING life, experiencing it. We only get one of these lives. So i am not going to pinch my pennies like Ebenezer Scrooge and hoard it all for a future that may never come. I prepare for the worst, but I don't let that preparation overwhelm the fact that there is a present, either.

OP-you can afford the vacations. You don't want them. That's okay. Just make sure your life has other meaningful experiences for your kids so everything balances out.[/quote]

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