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Have you ever wondered why your next-door neighbor must have a new car in his driveway every model year?

And not just a new car, but a new car with all the bells and whistles, like that 18-valve, turbo-charged, dyno-flex, hydroponic 4000 engine, 57-speaker audio system with Sistine Chapel acoustics and the buttery soft leathers imported from recently-discovered islands off the Madagascar coast?

It turns out he is just giving in to the inclinations that characterize too many American big spenders, who gain their greatest joy from acts of overspending.

That’s right, many humans are simply pre-programmed to overspend, an action that illuminates the pleasure centers of their brains. To these people, saving lacks sex appeal. It is spending, not saving, that is sexy.

• More than two-thirds (68.1 percent) of the elderly poor are women.
• An October 2012 study by the American Association of University Women found that over the course of a 35-year career, an American woman with a college degree will make about $1.2 million less than a man with the same education.
• More than 70 percent of nursing home residents are women, whose average age at admission was 80. In 2006, the average annual cost of a private room in a nursing home was $75,000 and a shared room almost $67,000.
• It is a well known fact that women live longer than men.
• A 2010 survey by Transamerica Center for Retirement Studies shows that just 8 percent of women feel they are already educated enough to successfully reach their retirement savings goals.

Where am I going with listing all these statistics? Women need to take their retirement planning seriously.

If you didn’t hear it on the news, you probably noticed it the last time you filled up your car: gasoline prices have been dropping lately after holding fairly steady for a year or so, following world oil prices.

After clicking your heels at the gas station when nobody was looking, you probably got in your car and started wondering: Is this for real? How long can it last? Is this just one of those blips you can clearly see on the chart, or are we seeing a fundamental shift toward lower energy prices? If lower energy prices sound like a dream, that’s because, in our lifetimes, we’ve only see them go up. However, the notion of a long-term drop in energy prices may not be so totally far-fetched.

Three mega-trends could account for the drop:

1. Natural gas

It’s a good thing that I am a planner by nature because, dealing with personal finance as I do involves a lot of long-term planning. So it might seem a little odd for me to take this position, but there are times when your finances might be better for not having made a plan — or at least for not being completely ruled by your plans.

Don’t take this too literally because planning has its place, but planning can also become tyrannical. It intimidates people from undertaking projects. Once a project is undertaken, too much reliance on planning can make people blind to better alternatives.

So the message here is don’t let planning become obsessive. The following are some examples of when freedom from planning can come in handy: