Sibylle Greindl
24 Apr 2026
Long-term investing, or how to take care of your future self
Most obstacles to investing are not financial, they are psychological. Understanding them helps you overcome them. Thomas invests 300€ a month starting at age 30. Emma starts at 40. By retirement, Thomas has twice as much as Emma, despite both starting out with exactly the same means. Why did Emma wait before beginning her long-term investment journey? Because of a well-documented cognitive mechanism: the present bias.
The present bias: the psychological barrier to long-term investing
Our brains assign more weight to an immediate reward than to an identical reward delayed in time. Behavioural economist Richard Thaler, Nobel laureate 2017, showed that this mechanism shapes our financial decisions in a systematic and predictable way. It is the product of an evolutionary process that served us well for millennia: in an uncertain world, the tangible present was worth more than a hypothetical future. A bird in the hand, as the saying goes.
Researcher Hal Hershfield of the University of California revealed an even more striking dimension. His work shows that we treat our future self as a stranger. The brain regions activated when we think about ourselves twenty years from now look more like those associated with an unknown person than those of our current self. Saving for retirement is, mentally, like making a gift to someone we do not know very well.
Cutting back on spending today to benefit from it thirty years from now requires genuine empathy towards a self we struggle to picture. The further the horizon, the more thankless that trade-off feels. This is one of the most underestimated barriers to getting started with investing in Belgium, whether you grew up here or arrived more recently.
Visualising your future for better long-term investment decisions
Entrepreneur Dan Sullivan framed this problem as a question: if you were to find yourself here three years from now, what would have had to happen for you to look back and feel genuinely satisfied with this period?
This question makes the future concrete. By visualising what you want to achieve, you give your future self an identity and your present effort a purpose.
The same logic plays out in everyday habits: parking your car facing the exit so you can leave without hassle, making your bed in the morning so it is ready at night. These actions require slightly more effort now, made consciously so a future version of you benefits directly.
Long-term investing follows exactly the same principle, with a longer horizon and proportionally greater rewards.
Your future self is already waiting
Today, you are the "future self" of ten years ago. You are now reaping the rewards of everything you set in motion back then, including financially.
Capital invested in the markets at that time has been compounding ever since. The longer that capital can grow for you, through the power of compound interest, the more you will harvest from it. It is that future yield you need to picture today, in order to make the decision your future self will be glad you made.
Over thirty-five years, 300€ a month invested in a diversified portfolio at an annualised return of 7% generates capital of around 500.000€. The same effort over twenty-five years produces roughly 240.000€. The entire difference comes down to the time the capital is given to grow. That is the power of compound interest in practice: unremarkable on any given month, but decisive over a lifetime of long-term saving in Belgium.
Making your future bigger than your past
A vague goal like "build up some savings" is too abstract to motivate an immediate decision. Aiming for 400.000€ in capital by age 60, on the other hand, gives your regular savings effort a clear direction and every monthly investment a concrete purpose.
The Easyvest simulator helps you take that step: in a few clicks, it projects how your capital could grow over ten, twenty, or thirty years, based on your time horizon and goals.
Thomas' capital at 65 is not the result of any particular talent. It is the product of a decision made at a specific moment: trusting a future self he could not yet picture clearly, but chose to protect.
At Easyvest, that conviction guides every portfolio: diversified exposure to global markets through low-cost ETFs, fees reduced to a minimum, and a committed long-term horizon. The decision you make today becomes, twenty years from now, exactly what you wanted for your future self.