Laziness cost me $720 today
By Matt - Saturday, May 15th, 2010
We’re all a little lazy for the sake of convenience every now and then and usually it doesn’t have any impact on our lives. At other times it costs us and today is one of those days for me; today my laziness cost me a lot of money. I needed to renew my license plates and where I live when you pay for this they check to see if you have any outstanding parking tickets which they make you pay before you can renew your plates. Unfortunately I had accumulated a bunch of parking tickets over the last year and i was lazy in paying them, I was also lazy when I got the tickets in the first place (but that’s a different story), but I knew that I’d have to pay for it. What I wasn’t prepared for was the cost. The unpaid parking tickets added up to a grand total of $720!
The really painful part of the story is that a significant chunk of that cost was late fees for not paying the tickets on time (about half the cost to be specific). By being lazy came back to bite me in the ass in a very major way. Not only did I let this amount get so high by being lazy but I got all of the tickets by being lazy (they were all from parking on my street without a parking permit which costs $10 a month). The moral of the story is that be careful of your laziness because there are times when it will come back to haunt you.
Taking the easy path might seem like the best approach but the path can very quickly change from being easy to being much harder and more costly than simply being proactive. In this case I am already being proactive since I have purchased the necessary parking permit for the remainder of the year, I just have to remember this day when the permit expires and get a new one.
It just makes me wonder how much money do we (in general) waste because we’re being lazy and don’t want to spend 15 minutes or 20 minutes to do something? I think I might need to look at other parts of my life to see if I’m not wasting more of my hard earned money.
This entry is filed under Commentary, News/Misc.
3 Responses to “Laziness cost me $720 today”
1 Revanche says:
May 15th, 2010
at 6:03 pm
I have definitely made that mistake before, but thankfully the fee was less than $400. They really get you for being late – I’m pretty sure I won’t ever forget that one again!
2 jacqjolie says:
May 15th, 2010
at 8:06 pm
Ouch, that hurts. This week, my dumb procrastination money blown was on some tile for a bathroom I was renovating. I bought the tile last year, didn’t realize until we opened the boxes that both boxes were short by a couple of tiles, so I didn’t have enough for the floor. And the tile was discontinued! Fortunately it was only a bathroom and I just bought a different kind of flooring, but I still kicked myself that I basically blew $90 from procrastinating.
3 Prince of Thrift says:
May 16th, 2010
at 5:30 am
Ouch,I have definitely made similar mistakes before, hopefully won’t do them ever again.
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