What He Said...

Here’s a compelling essay about one of my VERY serious hot-buttons in life… Frugality, and its obverse, our spendthrift society… courtesy of The Art of Manliness. Excerpt:

I was once watching a TV show in which a round table of finance gurus were dispensing money advice to the studio audience. One of the advisors said that people should give up little luxuries like a daily Starbucks run and save and invest that money instead. A woman in the audience stood up and cried, “But what if I don’t want to give up Starbucks?” The crowed roared and clapped in approval.

The Founding Fathers feared such attitudes. They feared that too much luxury made a nation weak. They would often point to the Greeks and Romans as examples of what happens to a nation when it lets prosperity go unchecked by temperance and frugality. John Adams often preached against “effeminate luxuries.” And although wealthy, Ben Franklin lived a relatively simple life. He made an effort to eat and dress plainly.

Unfortunately, Americans have lost sight of the importance of frugality. For a generation of men who have grown up in a period of unprecedented affluence, living frugally seems down right silly and old fashion. But if a man wishes to remain economically and emotionally independent, frugality is an essential virtue to develop.

Why Being Frugal is Essential to Manning Up

(ed: and the essay continues from there…)

Brett, the blog’s author, emphasizes that frugality is essential to one’s independence… in the sense that debt enslaves you, taking away a lot (if not nearly all) of the choices in life. Brett’s argument is mostly couched in “manly” terms, but his advice applies to everyone…man, woman, or child.

My parents were children of The Great Depression, and as such, were very well-equipped to teach their children the value of being frugal. Nothing teaches us as well as experience, be it personal or anecdotal. I use “anecdotal” in the sense that my father, while never destitute, saw enough destitution in pre-war (WW II) Detroit to fully appreciate what being destitute meant. There are damned few among us today that learned that lesson first-hand, and those that DID learn it won’t be with us all that much longer. So…it’s understandable, perhaps, that our instant-gratification, No-Money-Down!, Bad-Credit?-NOT-a-Problem!, society is out there on a rather thin limb.

Some of us, anyway. The thing that pisses me right off is the spendthrifts will take the rest of us down when that limb breaks. I’m not the first person to say this, but a LOT of our current financial crisis is due to the fact people bit off more… a LOT more… than they could chew. Who, in their right mind, would willingly take on a mortgage they KNOW they can’t afford? And the same thing goes for cars big-ass SUVs, boats, swimming pools, so on and so forth.

It’s waaay past time for us to Man Up…financially speaking.

(h/t: Mike…who tipped me to The Art of Manliness, but not about the frugality bits. Mike was on about pocket knives, and he was right about that.)