On Having Money

 

Peggy, our five cats, and I, live in a modest 69-year-old house in a slowly deteriorating neighborhood. In the past five months we’ve spent: $11,000 for a new roof; $12,000 for plumbing repairs; $4,000 for property taxes; $2,000 for cat care; $3,000 for rain gutters and gutter screens (we installed the screens); hundreds for house paint (we did the painting); and an uncalculated sum of money on four vacations that Peggy took. Neither of us inherited wealth nor did our combined salaries exceed a middle class income, but because we saved and were frugal, we have never bought anything—including four homes in three states—that we couldn’t have paid cash for.

My pilgrimages to the marble and granite cathedral that was State Bank and Trust Company, are among my happiest childhood memories for several reasons: my town didn’t have another building half so beautiful; I enjoyed watching my money “grow”; and the young women who recorded my fifty-cent deposits treated me like an adult and had smiles that dwarfed the sunrise.

My parents also saved, but Peggy’s parents saw things so differently that saving money was the only thing her father ever criticized me for because he saw it as putting my faith in “mammon” instead of God. He advised that I should, in the following order: donate 10% of my income to the church; pay my “just debts”; spend the remainder as I pleased; and trust God for help if I ran short. I considered this the stupidest and most unwarranted piece of advice I ever heard, plus it left me to wonder how he could be completely ignorant of the fact that his daughter hated his religion and shared her husband’s values. In fact, mine and Peggy’s only significant disagreement over money occurred soon after we married when I decreed that we economize by drinking powdered milk. A three-times-a-day milk-drinker, Peggy objected bitterly, but because she still had a vestigial amount of respect for her husband’s intelligence and had been raised to believe that “the husband should rule the wife even as Christ rules the church” (not that it worked that way with her parents), she grumblingly went along for several weeks before staging an all-out coup during which she would toast my health while drinking “real milk.” (I drink powdered milk to this day.)

Peggy’s father wasn’t my only critic. Most commonly I’ve been warned, “You can’t take it with you when you die” (three such people later asked for loans), but I consider frugality a virtue; I would loathe owing interest; I like not having to worry about how to pay for things; I feel more secure for having money; having money means not having to deny myself; and despite my critics’ argument that unspent money is wasted money, I feel good about leaving money to charity. While it’s true that the squirrel who stores nuts for winter might never enjoy the fruits of his labor, it would be a silly squirrel who refused to store nuts. But then a squirrel is not a grasshopper…

One December when I was eight, my parents put me on a plane to travel the hundred miles to visit my 19-year-old half-sister, Anne, who was attending college in New Orleans. Our mother expected Anne to drive me home, but because Anne had no car—and no money, for that matter—she borrowed one. Upon discovering that the car had no gas, she asked me for a loan. Despite her promise to pay me back when we reached Mississippi, I refused. I don’t know where she got the money, but her considerable anger didn’t prevent her from covering me with her coat when she realized that the car’s heater was broken. 

Despite her goodness, the wound I inflicted festered to the point that I don’t think she ever recovered. Because I was a child, perhaps the severity of her hurt can be partially explained by previous hurts she suffered over money. Her first hurt was inflicted by her father, Dustin, who, in the midst of the Great Depression abandoned his impoverished wife and two small children to pursue a playboy lifestyle. Upon Dustin’s death at age 36, Anne’s destitute mother entrusted her two children to Dustin’s siblings. Anne went to Dustin’s miserly brother, Ernie, who made it clear that she was a financial burden who wasn’t his real daughter. Worse yet, he interpreted Anne’s generous heart as evidence of improvidence, which he attempted to correct by sharing an Aesop’s fable entitled “The Ants and the Grasshopper”:

One bright day in late autumn a colony of ants were busy drying the grain they had stored for winter, when a starving grasshopper with a fiddle under his arm begged for a bite to eat.

“What!” cried he nearest ant, “haven’t you stored food for winter? What were you doing all summer?”
“I was so busy making music that I didn’t have time to harvest food, and before I knew it the summer was gone.”

“Making music!” the ant retorted as he turned his back on the starving grasshopper. “Very well; now you have the leisure to dance!”

When Anne later learned that grasshoppers are doomed to die at summer’s end no matter how much food they have, she condemned her uncle’s story as a lie.

My friend, Walt—whose death I described a few posts ago—had a Washington state friend who was beyond frugal. One day when Walt was vexed that Bob never visited him, he said, “Bob spends as little as possible on everything he buys, which is why he doesn’t have a car that will hold together for a trip to Oregon. When you buy, you buy quality. You’re frugal; Bobs cheap.”

Years ago, I won a trip to a luxury resort. That trip was the only time in our long marriage that Peggy and I lived like rich people are said to live. One morning while lying in our plush bed and watching ships on the Pacific, I had the thought that I would be enjoying myself more if I were lying in the bed of our van and looking through steamy windows while drinking coffee brewed on a Coleman stove. I don’t know if it was luck or intelligence that led me to marry a woman who has never once said, “My idea of roughing it is to stay in a Holiday Inn.”

I’ve known people who consider their purchase of new, trendy, name-brand items as proof of refinement, but used items cost less, off-gas less, offer a wider selection, and don’t deplete the earth’s resources. A 94-year-old American investor named Warren Buffet wears plain clothes and drive an old pickup despite being a billionaire 150-times over. If I were Buffet, I would give more to charity; buy flood insurance; replace three missing teeth with implants; and re-roof my patio, but that’s all I can think of, and I could do them now if I wanted.

Even so, I never feel completely secure because I believe that wealth consists of having enough money in enough kinds of investments that Peggy and I would have enough to live on no matter what happened. This is not true for us, so a flood, costly medical bills, an economic depression, a prolonged stay in a nursing home, or Oregon’s coming +9.0 earthquake, could really hurt us. Although most risks can be mitigated, such measures are often expensive and come with their own risks. For example, flood insurance would cost us $8,400 a year, and we’re not even in a flood zone.

A final factor in mine and Peggy’s spending habits is that after being frugal our entire lives, we’re not inclined to spend money simply because we can, and there are also charitable bequests to consider. People talk as though unspent money is wasted money, but because I already have everything I want, I’m happy to know that charities will profit from my death.