The correct and successful financial strategy under the fiat standard is to constantly take on as much debt as possible, be meticulous about making all payments on time, and use the debt to buy hard assets that generate future returns. Doing this successively improves your credit score and allows you to borrow at lower rates, while you store your wealth in goods that cannot be inflated as easily as fiat. The fiat system thus taxes savers and subsidizes responsible borrowers. The fiat standard encourages everyone to live fragile lives and take substantial financial risks, because the alternative is a slow, continuous bleeding of wealth. The more irresponsible the risk, the greater your chances of financial success or failure. The path to success ends up necessitating irresponsible decisions along the way. Businesses that are more reckless in taking on debt are more likely to fail than those that do not, but they are also far more likely to grow and drive competitors out.

As the value of money was destroyed, along with it went concern for the future. Attention turns instead to the short-term quest for survival. Saving becomes unthinkable, and people seek to spend whatever money they have as soon as they secure it. People begin to discount all things which have value for the long run, and capital is used for immediate consumption; fruit-bearing trees are chopped down for firewood in winter, businesses are liquidated to finance expenditure, and the proverbial seed corn is eaten. Human and physical capital leaves the country to go to places where savers can afford to maintain it and operate it productively. With the future so heavily discounted, there is less incentive to be civil, prudent, or law-abiding, and more incentive to be reckless, criminal, or dangerous. Crime and violence become exceedingly common as everyone feels robbed and seeks to take it out on whoever has anything. Families break down under financial strain. While more extreme in the cases of hyperinflation, these trends are nonetheless ever-present, in milder forms, under the yoke of the slow fiat inflationary bleed.

The culture of conspicuous mass consumption that pervades our planet today cannot be understood except through the distorted incentives fiat provides to consume. With the money constantly losing value, deferring consumption and saving will likely have a negative expected value. Finding the right investments is difficult, requires active management and supervision, and entails risk. The path of least resistance, and the one permeating the entire culture of fiat society is to consume all your income.

The family itself is also a victim of the onslaught of fiat inflationism on time preference. In all cultures, people invest their youth and resources into building a family with a life partner, sacrificing present resources to provide a safe fostering environment for children, and in return, they get a family to care for them in their old age. Starting a family is a low time preference decision that requires the individual to highly value the future and sacrifice for it. With hard money, the burden of sacrifice is lightened by the ability to save a money which appreciates in real terms. But when monetary hardness was compromised in the twentieth century, the ability of family members to provide for one another was also compromised. With fiat's loose supply growth resulting in continuous price rises, and savings not effective, the financial pressures of fiat have resulted in a large increase in families with two wage-earners, resulting in far less time in which family spend time together.As the stored monetary savings of the individual are depleted to finance the state, along with it goes the ability to provide. The ability of the state to provide undermines the individual's incentive to sacrifice to start a family. As education, child care, health care, and retirement become the responsibility of the state, the need for a family decreases, and the sacrifices required for it become less compelling. All the bonds of family will weaken when the power of provision is appropriated by the state.

Planning for old age is part of our nature as human beings, through saving and having children. Most humans to ever live understood that if you spend your youth building a healthy family, you stood a good chance of having loving company in your latter years, and someone to take care of you. The urge to have children is instinctive for most people, and the happiness they provide makes many want them, but few think of getting children as a great way to prepare for old age. Saving is not easy and the government is supposed to provide. It is very common to see people extend their adolescence indefinitely and waste their youth on inconsequential nonsense offering fleeting pleasures, but little lasting security, satisfaction, or fulfillment.