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Some of the best financial advice you can read today isn’t original or innovative; it’s just been rewritten for a new audience. Because money itself has been around a few thousand years, wise thinkers have had plenty of time to come up with helpful hints about saving, spending and borrowing the stuff. Want some evidence that your grandparents — or great-great grandparents, even — knew as much or more about money than you do? Check out these nuggets of financial wisdom drawn from books published generations ago. Their phrasing may be quaint, but their substance is as relevant as ever.
Let Us Rename Saving
“The great trouble with talking about saving is that people don’t like to be denied. They dislike to be repressed. They dislike to be told not to do things. ... Is it not unfortunate that we have the word ‘saving’ at all, with its ‘kill-joy’ implication? Would it not be better if we spoke of ‘delayed spending’ rather than saving?”
—Putnam’s Investment Handbook (1919)
Pay Yourself First
“We all probably have determined again and again to spend as economically as possible, that we may have something at the end of the month that we could ‘save,’ only to find that there never was anything left over. The only way that one can save money systematically is to put aside a fixed amount for that purpose every month or week, and this BEFORE one considers the other items of the budget.”
—Spending the Family Income (1922)
Some Luxuries Are Necessities
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“The half dollar that a man saves by renouncing the custom of bringing the weekly handful of flowers or box of candy to his wife is as poor an investment as that she makes when she abstains from giving him the savory meat which his soul loveth because it costs two cents more a pound than a cheaper dish for which he cares nothing. These kindly thoughts, these little evidences of tender recollection, make a better showing when they are added up than any savings bank account.”
—In City Tents (1902)
Appearances Are Costly
“A man should live more for himself than for the world — that is to say, that his expenditure should be regulated rather by the real extent of his means than by what the world supposes those means to be. ... If he is to model his conduct and expenditure on what he may suppose the world expects from him, he ceases to be independent, and is in fact the slave of all the gossips of his parish.”
—A New System of Practical Domestic Economy (1827)
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