Tidy analogy or quote re: plan for the future vs. crisis-to-crisis?

November 17, 2019 3:57 PM

Specifically, in the context of planning/budgeting when one is in debt. Focusing only on getting the $ together for the overdue rent without making a plan for how to auto-pay /budget for rent in the future is like just calling for more buckets to bail water out of a leaky boat, without also looking at how to patch the boat so it can sail the seas in the future. Or something. Is there a better analogy? Or has some famous person summed this up in a tidy quote?
posted by red_rabbit to Work & Money (8 answers total)

Best answer: fix the leaky pipe, then start mopping the floor.
posted by Wild_Eep at 4:01 PM on November 17, 2019 [6 favorites]

Seems pretty close to "If you're in a hole, stop digging."
posted by jon1270 at 4:16 PM on November 17, 2019

I googled for near-miss idioms like 'a stitch in time saves nine'/'an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure' and for short-term/long-term thinking quotes, and the pithiest thing I found was sort of a headline saying "short-term thinking is a long-term problem."
posted by Wobbuffet at 4:41 PM on November 17, 2019 [4 favorites]

Charles Dickens' character Wilkins Micawber in David Copperfield, “Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pound ought and six, result misery.”
posted by a humble nudibranch at 5:30 PM on November 17, 2019 [1 favorite]

A commentary on the situation: "When you're up to your ass in alligators, it's hard to remember that you came to drain the swamp."
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 5:55 PM on November 17, 2019 [1 favorite]

Such a situation is often referred to as "treading water", reflecting that effort is being spent to get nowhere.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 5:59 PM on November 17, 2019

Response by poster: Huge thanks! These were great. Appreciate it!
posted by red_rabbit at 9:26 PM on November 17, 2019

The tide analogy is "when the tide goes out, we will see who has been swimming naked", where the tide represents a financial slowdown and swimming naked means the person is so leveraged they will not only lose their shirt but also their pants presumably.
posted by The_Vegetables at 9:05 AM on November 18, 2019 [1 favorite]