In 2006 we purchased a new mattress. I figured a good nights sleep is worth a decent investment and so I really took some time to try a lot of different mattresses. After a week or so I had found the mattress I wanted. I was a little shocked at the price, but the salesperson told me the mattress had a 10 year warranty if the mattress didn’t hold up. That made me feel a little better about the amount of money I was going to be spending.  Thinking I was buying a top-of-the-line mattress with a good warranty and the hope for several years of good sleep, I decided to make the purchase.

Well about a year and a half after I purchased the mattress, it had become lumpy and extremely uncomfortable. So much so that every morning my wife and I would wake up with a lower back ache. I decided to contact the company to exercise my warranty. A week after I called, a gentleman from the mattress company showed up to evaluate my mattress. The gentleman who came to my house looked like he had recently been released from prison. Not exactly the warm friendly type of person I’d like to have standing in my bedroom. After a test where he basically used a string to measure the indentation in the mattress, he determined that the mattress was not in bad enough shape for me to exercise my warranty.

As he left my house I remember feeling very frustrated. I thought I had purchased a top-of-the-line mattress, and I had an expectation that my mattress would last for a minimum of 10 years. Plus if it did not, then I would at the very minimum get a new mattress out of the deal due to the warranty. Because I had spent so much on the mattress just a year and a half earlier, I couldn’t justify dumping this thing and going out and buying a new one.

So we continued to sleep on this lumpy and uncomfortable mattress for five more years.  Every morning my back and my wife’s back hurt. I just couldn’t get over the fact that I had paid top dollar for a mattress, and I wasn’t willing to buy a new one until I got every ounce of sleep I could get out of this darn thing. Then one day my back hurt so bad I could barely move. After an MRI, I found out I had 2 bulging disks. Now I’m not sure how I injured my back, and I can’t say for sure that it was from six and a half years of sleeping on a bad mattress, but that is what I attributed it to.

Finally I just couldn’t stand sleeping on this bad mattress one more night. I purchased a new mattress, and, like magic, my back and my wife’s back didn’t hurt anymore when we woke up in the morning. Looking back I wish I would have taken action immediately to correct the problem of the uncomfortable mattress instead of living in discomfort for over six years.

Often times I meet with people who have purchased investments or insurance products that have just not performed as they had hoped. In some cases people have lost a lot of money. Instead of just dumping the crummy investment, they want to hold onto it just a little bit longer and hope things will get better. I’ve learned from my own poor choices and watching what others do that many of us do not make a change until the discomfort of our existing condition is so bad that we just can’t stand it any more.

I’d like to encourage you to learn from my mistake. If you bought a mattress you thought was good and turned out bad, then please don’t wait until you have bulging disks to make the change. Set your pride and ego off to the side and learn from the mistake. And if you bought some investment or insurance products that stink, realize you made a mistake, learn from it and fix it before you experience the prolonged pain of a bad decision.