Summer Time....

And the livin' is easy....if you have enough coin of the realm. The trouble is, every year the coin in your pocket or purse is worth less than it was last year. When I was a young man, about the time the Titanic sank, I was told that I should save as much as I could so that I would live comfortably in my old age. So I saved, and saved and saved, but how much can you save when your gross income is $200 per month. That was an average wage in 1950 or so. Of course it wasn't possible to save much. A fast-talking insurance salesman persuaded me to buy an annuity. If I paid in $90 per year until I was 70 I could then retire in luxury on the $25 per month which the insurance company would give me. It wasn't easy to scrape together 90 buck a year but I did, for a while. Then there was a recession in the mid fifties and I was unemployed for 3 or 4 months. So I couldn't make the premium payments, and my policy was cancelled. I got nothing back, but it was one of the luckiest things that ever happened to me. 90 bucks was real money in 1950. You could rent a real nice house for 25 a month in my town. A new Chevy cost about a thousand. The point is that had I kept on paying for that stupid annuity I'd now be cashing a check every month for $25 which is about what my ISP charges me for a 56k dialup connection. Buying things, including real estate would have made sense, but buying annuities from an insurance company was stupid then and it's stupid now.

I suppose that saving money made good sense before WWI because inflation had been zero for about 200 years. I have one of my mother's old cook books. Some of the recipes call for things like "...5 cents worth of butter..." , instead of so many tablespoons, etc..

Today, nobody but a chump saves money. My income is below average but I make it a point to spend every cent of it. I also make it a point to never carry a balance on a credit card.