Shooting the Moon
December 8th, 2007 | by rocketc |Hearts, the card game and personal finance.
I recently spent a long vacation at the home of relatives who do not watch television or have internet or really have much to do around the house at all. We visit here once a year and while they are very nice people, I always pick up a new hobby while there. One year I read a couple of books during my visit. Another year I focused on magazines - they usually have plenty laying around. Last year I took up cross-word puzzles. Next year I am going to bring a book of sudoku puzzles.
This year, I brought along a laptop that is primarily used for blogging and email. I have installed no extra programs on this machine. I am not really into computer games, so the only games on this computer are the ones that are already installed by windows. I think the suite of games is familiar to everyone. I played solitaire for a while - easy enough game, but difficult to win more than about once in every 50 tries. I then moved to minesweeper - fun game but impossible to play with a laptop mouse. I tried “freecell”, but I wasn’t bored enough for that game. Eventually I settled on “hearts”.
For those of you who don’t know, hearts is a little like euchre, except the object is to score as few points as possible by losing hands that include point cards (queen of spades and hearts, of course). If you “win” those particular cards, you are assigned points. The game is over when someone reaches 100 points and the person with the lowest total is the winner.
Anyway, there are two ways to win in hearts - the first is a bit dull. The player avoids winning hands and tries to keep his score a low as possible through each round of play. It requires some strategy, but more importantly it requires discipline, perseverance and patience. The second way to win is by winning all of the points in a hand and thereby giving 26 points to each of your opponents and zero to yourself. This is called “shooting the moon”. The problem with this method is that if your opponent even wins one point, you are saddled with the left over 25 points.
Of course, being the thrillseeker that I am, I attempt to “shoot the moon” every hand and generally fail miserably. My winning percentage is about 10% at the moment.
For many years, this was my strategy for dealing with family finances and especially long-term financial planning. I found the little things boring: budgeting, looking for the best deals, saving for big expenses, delaying gratification, packing a lunch, regular saving, etc. Instead, we purchased what we wanted and then figured out a way to pay for it. We lived on the assumption that I would get a high-paying job in the near future or a relative would leave us some cash or some other event would provided us with a large sum of money to pay down debt or save for retirement.
We were trying to “shoot the moon” financially.
Shooting the moon is not a good strategy in hearts or in personal finance. Thankfully, we are starting to get back on track and seeking to be content with a more patient, wiser approach to financial planning. Maybe next year, I should take along a stack of Money Magazines to pass the time.
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