In the late 1950s our brother, Don, was selling investments for Investors Diversified Services. His pitch to us was, ‘If you saved just 50 cents a day you’d have $182 each year and be well on the way to early retirement.?
He did something right, retirin at about 50.
I told him I couldn’t put 50 cents a day away, and to take his pitch, and . . .
I retired at 68, but the kids are paying me to write this column.
What I’m going to tell you this week is how to save money, not to be able to retire early, but to be able to buy a gallon of gasoline or milk.
These are Depression-learned lessons, or advice from a cheapskate. Some say a depression would be good for the last two generations, then maybe they’d have learned to live within their means, without credit card interest rates stifling their good-life goals.
Of course, if everyone lived without credit this entire nation, and not just Michigan, would be welfare dependent.
Anyway . . . this is being written on a 95 degree day. To me that means saving money starts in the bathroom. Rinse, no soap, the overnight grease off your face ’cause you’re going to be sweating all day.
Then forget applying that underarm deodorant. Same thing. It’s a waste. Besides, do you ever smell anyone’s armpit? Does anyone ever smell yours? And, sell your stock in Proctor & Gamble’s Old Spice. More savings when the stock plummets as my advice gains momentum.
Weekly washing of bed sheets is really more of a habit than necessity. We don pajamas or night shirts when we go to bed, so our skin doesn’t touch the sheets anyway. Wash ’em maybe once a month.
Even if there’s smudges the wrinkles in the sheets pretty-much hide them.
Then when you wash, use half a capful of soap. If you noticed the ads this week for Tide, they have substituted a smaller cap for their ‘new? soap, and I believe less soap will clean our clothes and the large cap is just a suggested amount and only sized to sell soap.
We can all get by with less toothpaste, too. If a small dollop will do on an Oral B electric brush, the same amount should be good on a conventional toothbrush. Besides it’s the brush, not the paste, that does the cleaning. Paste is for taste.
Now we move to a restaurant outing with family and friends. I got this money-saving idea when a friend, Dick K., had the waitress bring his leftover steak to me in a take-home box for madog Shayna.
I did, but I didn’t have to give that meat to Shayna. Then last week daughter Luan and I had too-heavy servings of chicken & mushroom fettuccini.
We combined it in one box and I had three meals of it and Shayna one.
So, friends and readers, when you see an acquaintance about to leave tasty looking food for the restaurant’s garbage can, ask if you can take it home. It’s only uncomfortable for a while, and soon you and they will expect it and maybe quit talking about your idiosyncracies.
If that ‘borrowing? is hard to do you can always say you’re taking it to Jim’s dog, Shayna.
Besides, you never see your friends and relatives spit on their food. It might happen in a kitchen, but not at the table.
My daddy often complained about The Depression of the 1930s, but look at how it helped my savings plan, and maybe it will do the same for you.