Valentine’s Day Has Come and Gone. Check Your Bank Account

So you made it through one of the most fraught of the fake holidays—no thanks to the financial services industry, which piled fear on top of Valentine's Day's other pressures. Not content to bombard consumers (and journalists) every other day of the year, marketers tied themselves in love knots this week trying to connect your heart with your wallet, often in extremely unromantic ways.

Take a clear-eyed look at what you spend on Feb. 14, TD Ameritrade recommended—and what it will cost you down the line. Say you throw out $200 or so on a gift and a nice, romantic meal. "Using TD Ameritrade’s Time Value calculator, if someone has an initial deposit of zero, and chooses to deposit $200 a month at an annual rate of 5 percent, that investment would come to roughly $31,000 over ten or more years and $82,000 over 20 or more years,"1487023268311 according to the company.