แปลบทความวิจัยpropensity to tolerate debt is a complex issue, and ``savers and borrowers F F F have different psychological motivations, seeing debt either as a failure or as a normal part of everyday life'' (Livingstone and Lunt, 1993, p. 963). The preferences of our interviewees might suggest that they are best categorised as ``savers'' wishing to avoid the ``failure'' of falling into debt.
Long-term financial planning
This aspect of home accounting, which has received little attention from the academic accounting community (Walker and Llewellyn, 2000, this issue), was the least evident in the practices of interviewees. Only one interviewee held ISAs[8] and other investments, which he enjoyed monitoring and manipulating for maximum return. Another interviewee monitored share price movements because of his partner's participation in an employee share-purchase scheme. Aside from the small building society accounts or ``rainy day funds'' held by most interviewees, home equity was considered to represent the main form of investment[9]. There was little evidence amongst our interviewees of formulating long-term investment strategies, or of evaluating their current and future net worth. Few had sought any kind of expert investment advice, although some took in publicly available sources of economic information from time to time, such as the financial pages of newspapers, money programmes on the television or radio, or the Internet.
Interviewees generally had a short-term orientation that reduced their tendency to engage in long-term financial planning. When asked about other long-term financial management and retirement goals, responses tended to be vague. The certainty of impending needs seemed often to dominate over the uncertainty and intangibility of future eventualities:
If I survive to the age of 60 then hopefully my mortgage will be paid off and I will be all right. I don't think of worries then, since I've got worries now (S9).
Such ``myopic preferences'' of individuals have been noted by Thaler (1992), who gives examples of irrational short-term decisions such as failing to pay for home insulation even though the savings clearly outweigh the costs. Some interviewees gave similar examples of such financial myopia. For example, the following quote pertains to car financing arrangements:
We got a three-year deal. When you hand it [the car] back, it's got a certain value. It's all arranged so that you're only making payments for the part of the car you're using over the three years F F F It might not be the cheapest form of finance, but it's the most manageable for us. It's easier than taking on a big debt (S4).
Most interviewees demonstrated long-term thinking only in terms of increasing their home equity, saving for their children's futures and participating in pension schemes. Other forms of long-term savings were undertaken in an ad hoc fashion. Compared to interviewees' abilities to specify short-term savings goals, long-term savings goals were rarely quantified, even where these savings were designated for special purposes.