Save Your Money

The world is full of people who can't imagine why they don't prosper like their neighbors. The real obstacle is not in the banks nor tariffs, in bad public policy nor hard times, but in their own extravagance and heedless ostentation. The young mechanic or clerk marries and takes a house, which he proceeds to furnish twice as expensively as he can afford; and then his wife, instead of taking hold to help him earn a livelihood by doing her own work, must have a hired servant to help her spend his limited earnings.

Ten years afterward, you will find him struggling on under a double load of debts and children, wondering why the luck was always against him, while his friends regret his unhappy destitution of financial ability. Had they, from the first, been frank and honest, he need not have been so unlucky.

Inordinate expenditure is the cause of a great share of the crime and consequent misery which devastate the world. The clerk who spends more than he earns, is fast qualifying himself for a gambler and a thief; the trader or mechanic who overruns his income, is very certain to become in time a trickster and a cheat. Wherever you see a man spending faster than he earns, there look out for villainy to be developed, though it be the farthest thing possible from his present thought.

Let a man have a genius for spending, and whether his income is a dollar a day or a dollar a minute, it is equally certain to prove inadequate. If dining, wining, and party-giving won't help him through with it, building, gaming, and speculation will be sure to. The bottomless pocket will never fill, no matter how bounteous the stream pouring into it.

That we are born "free and equal" is a glorious truth in one sense, yet we are not all born equally rich, and we never shall be. One may say; "there is a man who has an income of 150,000 dollars per year, while I have but 40 thousand dollars; I knew that fellow when he was poor like myself; now he is rich and thinks he is better than I am; I will show him that I am as good as he is; I will go and buy a Harley or a Hummer.

My friend, you need not take that trouble; you can easily prove that you are "as good as he is;" you have only to behave as well as he does; but you cannot make anybody believe that you are rich as he is.

Live Simply. Save your money.