Laura Rowley Money & Happiness

I recently returned from an annual weekend getaway with my mother and four sisters in Houston. (Spread out from California to Chicago to New Jersey, we inevitably find ourselves meeting in the geographic middle -- Texas.)

On these weekends, my mother, who is 76, has developed a habit of bringing along and returning photos I've sent to her over the years.

Focusing on the Present

I find this practice a little depressing: It reminds me that our time together is slipping away. It makes me want to warn my younger self that the freewheeling-foreign-correspondent thing isn't going to play out quite the way I expected. And I'm a little mortified by the bad perms in every shot prior to 1990.

But it also makes me reflect on the choices I made about money. Our brains are designed to focus on present needs (food, shelter, Lexus), and aren't enamored of the concept of saving cash to take care of our future selves.

For instance, in a study conducted by Hal Ersner-Hershfield at the Stanford Center on Longevity, researchers scanned the brains of participants with an MRI as they were asked to picture themselves in retirement. The results showed no activity in the part of the brain that typically fires up when we think about ourselves -- it was as if the participants were contemplating strangers.

Photographic Memories

Looking at the photos my mother gave me, I wanted to say a few things to those "strangers" from the past about their financial decisions. To borrow an expression, sometimes a picture deserves a thousand words:

Image 1: A snapshot of a 17-year-old dancing the polka in the high school production of "The King and I."

It's a little crazy, this extracurricular schedule and your Saturday job, which you've had since age 14. But working enables you to sock away several thousand dollars in a bank CD, which is earning around 13 percent (a guaranteed return you'll never see again).

I know you're frustrated because the amount you saved isn't enough to let you go to that prestigious private college, where tuition alone cost $14,000 a year. Instead, you'll choose the highly regarded state school where tuition is just over $1,100 a year. Don't worry; the education is excellent; it turns out fine career-wise, and with the money you save you can afford to study overseas and literally see the world.

Best of all, you start your working life debt-free. In the end, I think that opens the door to as many options as the expensive degree would have.

Image 2: A black-and-white employee headshot from your first newspaper job out of college.

You live in a row house with nine roommates, drive a battered Toyota, occasionally baby-sit for extra cash, and perfect the art of frugal fun. Know that in 20 years, when you can afford to stay at luxury hotels with extravagant spas, it'll still be the quality of the company you keep that makes the experience worthwhile.

And it was smart to splurge on the skydiving expedition. That memory is priceless, and you'll eventually get a lot of mileage out of the story with your kids.

Image 3: A 1995 photo of you in a strappy velvet number, standing next to your uncle at an awards dinner honoring your cousin at The Met in New York. (No more bad perms, but that shade of white-blond is a little dicey.)

You live in an affordable one-bedroom apartment and haven't owned a car since college; the one you buy in seven years will be manufactured this year. (And thanks for storing the dress; it'll come back in style in time for an awards event in 2007.)

A few months earlier, you and your cousin spent 10 crazy days roaming in Africa, including a campout in the Sahara during a sandstorm. It was smart to spend fearlessly on this event. In two years you'll have the first of your three precious children, and the memories will keep you from succumbing to death-by-suburb. (However, it would be helpful now to stop obsessing about your lack of space; the spending-on-experiences thing will become a theme, and your housing will always fall short by 1,000 square feet or so.)

You're about to start a new job you love. Good move to roll over the retirement fund from your last job, and max out your 401(k) contributions for the next six years. This growing nest egg will give you the confidence to risk working for yourself seven years later -- and that'll work out even better than you hoped.

Your Future Revealed

Although I'm grateful for the decisions made by these "strangers" from my past, old photos can't help people make smarter temporal decisions about money. But photos of ourselves in the future might, at least according to Hal Ersner-Hershfield, the Stanford researcher who conducted the MRI studies.

Ersner-Hershfield did a follow-up experiment with four participants. He took photographs of two of them, digitally altered their images to look older, and had them don a pair of virtual reality goggles and interact with their older selves in a mirror. Then all four participants were given the opportunity to spend or invest $1,000. Those who spent time with their older images put half the money into retirement savings -- compared with $200 for the participants who never saw the images of their future.

Looking for a way to see your own future self? Try this age-progression software, which was designed to prompt you to take better care of your health. With any luck, a look into the future may boost your savings strategy as well.