“Great fortunes grow from small interest.”
WHAT is paid for the use of a house is “rent.”
What is paid you for your work is “salary” or “wages.”
What is paid your money for its work is “interest.”
And interest is about the only money you ever can be sure of getting without working for it yourself.
When you save a dollar out of your earnings, look at it! Think that it actually represents a part of your life, your strength, your youth. You can keep that much of your life and strength and youth, or you can spend it and have nothing to show for it. You can put it in a bank where it will wait for you and work for you, and will turn over to you every six months the wages or ” inter?est” it has earned.
You can make the strength and youth which you are leaving behind you each day work over and over again for you; you can make it stick by you and be your assistant in earning your income for all the rest of your life–or you can spend it once, and then it is gone forever, Each six months the interest earned by your savings is added to the amount in your bank book, so you are continually receiving interest on interest, and the sum you have in the bank is growing night and day.
Instead of your youth and strength being spent as you live along day after day, you can turn your health and strength into cash and put it where you can rely upon it and can get it when the time comes that you need it.
Here is the story told by a wealthy man:
“When I was just a young fellow, I heard one of the older men in the office where I worked say that he could not hold onto his money when he had it in his pockets–but he didn’t have any trouble keeping it when he put it in the bank. So I marched over to a bank with a $2 bill.
“I didn’t take myself seriously when I walked over to a bank with a $2 bill–I did it as a sort of joke with myself. But the fellow behind the grating at the bank looked just as serious as though I had handed him two thousand dollars. And after he had made out my pass-book with my name and address, I went by the desk where the manager of the Savings Department was sitting. He treated me as deferentially as though I was one of their largest depositors, and before I was through talking with him I had begun to realize that maybe I had taken the most important step in my life. I lost the feeling that my deposit was so small as to be a joke, and it dawned upon me that the amount did not matter–it was the fact that I had started to save money that counted.
“All the next month I found myself saving a dime here and a quarter there. I did not do without anything I needed, but just planned a little. And, inexperienced as I was in economizing, I saved $10 that first month. That $10 looked bigger to mo entered on the first page of my bank book than all the rest of my month’s wages–because that $10 was mine–absolutely mine, and the rest of my money had to go to pay for board and a place to bleep, and the little expenses that eat such a hole in a young fellow’s small wages.
“In that first year I saved almost $200, and I got 3 per cent interest on every dollar of it all the time it was there. Even the money I deposited a couple of months before the end of the year brought me two months’ interest. I did not draw out a cent of what I had deposited, for I was put?ting my money in the bank to work it–not merely to have it in a safe place for a time.”
A famous millionaire who died several years ago had a keen brain for saving money–different from a keen brain for spending money, or he would not have been a millionaire-and he appreciated thrift in a way that the average individual does not.
He asserted that money has actual work to do, and it must be pushed and kept busy every minute of the time.
“How few are our real wants! and how easy it is to satisfy them ‘ Our imaginary ones are boundless and insanable.”–Anon.