Saving a Farm in Six Years.
The Accumulation of Wealth
On a fifty-acre farm in a fertile part of Indiana, there is the happiest little woman you can find in a long day's journey. Happy--and yet she is so crippled that she can only walk by the help of crutches.
She worked for six years in the city, packing lunch boxes, and through that time she saved her money, putting all she could spare from each week's wages into the bank.
In those six years she saved enough to make a substantial payment on her fifty-acre farm, and to take her mother and herself there and start raising chickens.
After that--don't let us hear anybody who is healthy and strong say he "can't get ahead in the world."
Indeed, after reading that story, who can blame a well-known financier for saying:
"When I hear a man drawing a fair salary complain that he cannot save money, I make up my mind that he doesn't really want to."
A very rich man had a little son who, like other rich men's sons, believed he had only to ask for anything to have it. The father determined to teach the boy the value of money.
The children next door had a pony, and the rich man's little son begged for one like it.
"Well," said the father, "if you had saved the pocket money which has been given you, you could buy a pony now just like that one. Since you have spent your money you must do without the pony."
That was the first time the boy realized that saving his money meant having something he very much wanted, and he began to save. By the time he was fifteen he had enough to buy the pony. But then his father said to him: "Do you remember that fine, big, black horse which Mr. Smith owns? If you save your money about a year longer, you will have enough to buy that horse instead of the pony."
The boy wanted the horse worse than he wanted the pony (as his father well knew), so he saved his money another year.
Then the father said: "You have enough money to buy the big, black horse now, have you? The most of the young fellows are buying automobiles. If you save a little while longer you can buy a handsome roadster."
By the time the money was saved for the automobile, the father pointed out a piece of real estate which could be bought at a bargain and was likely to increase rapidly in value. And by this time the boy was old enough to have the budding desire to become a business man and a capitalist--and when his father showed him how he had been led on, step by step, into accumulating a bank account, through the incentive of always saving his money for the purpose of buying what he wanted very much, he said:
"Eh, Dad, it's no wonder you have made a million since you were a boy! I did not dream I was being 'managed,' but you have taught me what no talk would ever have done.
"If every boy had a father who was smart enough to lead him on to saving his money-- there'd be more millionaires in the United States than there are sparrows."
"He who is taught to live upon little owes more to his father's wisdom than he that has a great deal left him does to his father's care."--Penn.
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