"Especially when it’s done wrong"

Felix Salmon has another intriguing (and, more to the point, important) post on saving and investing based on this (also intriguing and important) paper by Wade Pfau on saving and investing. I won't try to summarize but I have to quote this one paragraph.

Investing can be exciting, especially when it’s done wrong. You follow the markets rising and falling, you obsess about your retirement-fund balance, you rotate out of this and into that, you read books and magazines and blogs to try to learn more about what to do. You might even, in a moment of weakness, find yourself watching CNBC. Budgeting, by contrast, is like going on a diet: it’s a drag, and it’s hard to get any pleasure or excitement out of it. But the latter is much more likely to get you well-set in retirement than the former.