A Christian's Habits: Chapter Seven
A Christian's Habits: Chapter Seven
The Habit of Wise Spending.
It is hard for an empty sack to stand upright. -Benjamin Franklin
“If we stop the leaks, the supply will grow.” -Robert Speer
Financial freedom is a worthy goal. It has the power to break the chains of our daily grind. It can empower us to pursue what is good but not necessarily profitable. Financial freedom facilitates and supports makinggoodhappen in our lives, our relationships and our community. Many of us seek it. But how do we find it?
It isn’t easy. Many fall into the trap of quick money schemes and end up missing the mark completely. Others, who build wealth become the heartless Scrooge of Dicken’s Christmas Carol. But there are some role models out there who have achieved a generous financial freedom and have written about it. In this chapter we meet some of them.
Speer himself tells us about his own insights in stewarding his finances. He also shares wisdom from Benjamin Franklin, Mary Bushnell Cheney and William Gladstone. It is well worth your time to sort through this chapter and discover the treasures that will enhance your life today.
So without further ado, here is chapter seven of A Christian’s Habits, “The Habit of Wise Spending.”
I. Investing What You Have
How are you investing your money?
“I don’t see why it is wrong to gamble at cards,” said a student in one of our colleges. “On what grounds is it wrong? I do not lose more than I can afford to lose and I like the excitement which I get for the money.” “Well,” said his friend, “I think I see several reasons why it is wrong, but it seems to me that it is enough to say that it is a silly way to spend money. You don’t really get anything in return for it. And it is not only silly, it is wickedly wasteful. When there are in every one of our cities, agencies for the care of destitute children and for all kinds of benevolent and useful service, cramped and straitened for funds, when you remember how much good money can do, I think a man has no right to waste his money in gambling.” We have no more right to spend wrongly than we have to acquire wrongly.
“Industry and frugality are the simple rules of prosperity.”
This question of the wise spending of our money is fundamental. It is a question of the spending of our life, or of some one’s life. For money is life. As Dr. Schauffler said once in an address:
“Money is myself. I am a laboring man, we will say, and can handle a pickax, and I hire myself out for a week at two dollars a day. At the close of the week I get twelve dollars and I put it in my pocket. What is that twelve dollars? It is a week’s worth of my muscle put into greenbacks and pocketed; that is, I have a week’s worth of myself in my pocket.
Now, the moment you understand this, you begin to understand that money in your pocket is not merely silver and gold, but is something human, something that is instinct with power, because it represents power expended. (If you are not earning any money of your own, and your father is supporting you, then you are carrying that much of your father around in your pocket.) Now money is like electricity; it is stored power, and it is only a question as to where that power is to be loosed.
Do you see what a blessed, what a solemn thing this giving is, this giving of my stored self to my Master? Surely we need, in the matter of giving, consecrated thought as to where to loose ourselves, earnest prayer in the guidance of choice of where to loose our stored power, and earnest prayer to God to add his blessing to the loosed personality in this money that I have sent abroad, that there may come a tenfold increase because of my personal power that I have sent.”
What is true of giving is true to all spending. We have no right to be reckless of human life, and yet we are reckless of life when we spend money recklessly.
II. Industry and Frugality
What are the “leaks” in your spending? How can you stop them so the “supply can grow”?
The question of saving is simply the question of spending. Industry and frugality are the simple rules of prosperity. “In order to secure my credit and character as a tradesman,” says Benjamin Franklin in his shrewd autobiography “I took care not only to be in reality industrious and frugal, but to avoid the appearances to the contrary.” On these two principles1 he constantly lays emphasis. Of his printing business in Philadelphia he writes: “My circumstances, however, grew daily easier. My original habits of frugality continuing, and my father having, among his instructions to me when a boy, frequently repeated a proverb of Solomon, ‘Seest thou a man diligent in business? he shall stand before kings; he shall not stand before mean men.’ I thence considered industry as a means of obtaining wealth and distinction which encouraged me, though I did not think that I should ever literally stand before kings, which, however, has since happened; for I have stood before five, and even had the honor of sitting down with one, the King of Denmark, to dinner.”
The fifth and sixth among the virtues he set out to acquire were:
“Frugality - Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself; that is, waste nothing.”
“Industry - Lose not time; be always employed in something useful; cut off all unnecessary actions.”
He tells us of his “Poor Richard’s Almanac”:
“I filled all the little spaces that occurred between the remarkable days in the calendar, with proverbial sentences, chiefly such as inculcated industry and frugality, as the means of procuring wealth and thereby securing virtue; it being more difficult for a man in want to act always honestly, as, to use here one of those proverbs, ‘It is hard for an empty sack to stand upright.’”
“To be rich is no high ambition, but each of us not only may, but ought to strive to be independent and to provide for others dependent upon us.”
To be rich is no high ambition, but each of us not only may, but ought to strive to be independent and to provide for others dependent upon us. And the way to do this which is open to us is not the earning of large sums of money, but the saving of small sums. If we stop the leaks, the supply will grow. What we thus save is not our treasure. That is to be laid up “where neither moth nor rust doth consume, and where thieves do not break through nor steal.” If what we save becomes our treasure we are doing wrong. But we are not doing our duty if we carelessly let all that comes to us slip loosely away and do nothing to prepare for our future needs and those of others. Nothing in the Old Testament or New excuses any of us from the duties of industry and frugality.
III. Hard Times: The Finest School of Character
How has your life shaped your character?
“Families then practiced both, cultivated an energy and simplicity which constituted in many a home the finest school of character to be found, and extracted from hard conditions a comfortable subsistence to the old, and a hard-bought education to the young.”
The virtue of simplicity in spending is rarer now than it was in an earlier day. Then the very conditions of life in our country forced upon the people, except a few, a much sterner economy and more frugal management than is usual now. Families then practiced both, cultivated an energy and simplicity which constituted in many a home the finest school of character to be found, and extracted from hard conditions a comfortable subsistence to the old, and a hard-bought education to the young. In Mrs. Cheney’s life of her father, Horace Bushnell, there is a beautiful picture of such a home, and Horace Bushnell himself has described, in a noble speech on “The Age of Homespun,” the frugality of the home:
“It was also a great point, in the homespun mode of life, that it imparted exactly what many speak of only with contempt, a closely girded habit of economy. Harnessed, all together, into the producing process of, young and old, male and female, from the boy that rode the plow horse to the grandmother knitting under her spectacles, they had no conception of squandering lightly what they all had been at work, thread by thread, grain by grain, to produce. They knew too exactly what everything cost, even small things, not to husband them carefully. Men of patrimony in the great world, therefore, noticing their small way in trade or expenditure, are ready, as we often see, to charge them with meanness, simply because they knew things only in the small; or, what is not far different, because they were too simple and rustic to have any conception of the big operations by which other men are wont to get their money without earning it, and lavish more freely because it was not earned. Still, this knowing life only in small, it will be found is really anything but meanness.”
Many of the strongest and best men of our country came from such homes and regret that their children did not have the strong discipline of their fathers.
Occasionally a strong man who did not grow up in such a homespun home has nevertheless a character of exactness and simplicity and the will and wisdom to strive to pass it on to his children. In Mr. Morley’s “Life of Gladstone,” a letter of Mr. Gladstone’s to his son is printed, revealing the man who wrote, and counseling with sound sense, the younger man who was in college at Oxford at the time:
To keep a short journal of principal employments in each day; most valuable as an account book of the all-precious gift of Time.”
To keep also an account book of receipt and expenditure; and the least troublesome way of keeping it is to keep it with care. This done in early life, and carefully done, creates the habit of performing the great duty of keeping our expenditure (and therefore our desires) within our means.
Read attentively (and it is pleasant reading) Taylor’s Essay on Money which, if I have not done it already, I will give you. It is most healthy and most useful reading.
Establish a minimum number of hours in the day for study, say seven at present, and do not without reasonable cause, let it be less; noting down against yourself the days of exception. There should also be a minimum number for the vacations, which at Oxford are extremely long.
There arises an important question about Sundays. Though we should to the best of our power avoid secular work on Sundays, it does not follow that the mind should remain idle. There is an immense field of knowledge connected with religion, and much of it is of a kind that will be of use in the schools and in relation to your general studies. In these days of shallow skepticism, so widely spread, it is more than ever to be desired that we should be able to give a reason for the hope that is in us.
As to duties directly religious, such as daily prayer in the morning and evening, and daily reading of some portion of Holy Scripture, or as to the holy ordinances of the gospel, there is little need, I am confident, to advise you; one thing, however, I would say, that it is not difficult, and it is most beneficial, to cultivate the habit of inwardly turning the thoughts to God, though but for a moment in the course, or during the interval of our business; which continually presents occasions requiring his aid and guidance.
Turning again to ordinary duty, I know no precept more wide or more valuable than this: cultivate self-help; do not seek nor like to be dependent upon others for what you can yourself supply; and keep down as much as you can the standard of your wants, for in this lies a great secret of manliness, true wealth, and happiness; as, on the other hand, the multiplication of our wants makes us effeminate and slavish, as well as selfish.
IV. The Methodical Use of Money
How do you use your money?
In regard to money as well as time, there is a great advantage in its methodical use. Especially is it wise to dedicate a certain portion of our means to purposes of charity and religion, and this is more easily begun in youth than in after life. The greatest advantage of making a little fund of this kind is that when we are asked to give, the competition is not between self on the one hand and charity on the other, but between the different purposes of religion and charity with one another, among which we ought to make the most careful choice. It is desirable that the fund thus devoted should not be less than one tenth our means; and it tends to bring a blessing on the rest.”
Such care and frugality, as Bushnell said, are not meanness. They are simple honesty. Some people think that all spending is good because it promotes business, and that even extravagance has its excuse in providing labor for those who minister to it. But there is bad and wasteful spending as well as good and helpful spending. Money that is at work employing men at useful production is doing more than money lavished on frills and whims whose manufacture can only be capricious.
Some people want whatever they see. Children are constantly longing for whatever they have not, but see picture of, or find that other children have. And many grown up people are like children in this. If they have money they spend it without looking forward and asking whether there is not some better use to make of it or some greater need to be met. But having money is no reason for throwing it away. It is ours to be used sacredly as a trust. And worse than all this waste of what we have, is the folly of some who spend what they have not, incurring obligations which they cannot discharge. The honest man cannot understand how the dishonest or reckless man can do this, or how doing it, he can hold up his head among his fellows. The duty of wise spending requires us to live within what money we have, and not to spend what we do not have.
We shall only use money wisely when we can do so habitually, when the right use of each dollar and of each cent of each dollar is a law of our nature.
Fran worked to develop his character from 13 virtues he decided upon when he was 20 years of age. They were: (1) Temperance, (2) Silence, (3) Order, (4) Resolution, (5) Frugality, (6) Industry, (7) Sincerity, (8) Justice, (9) Moderation, (10) Cleanliness, (11) Tranquility, (12) Chastity, (13) Humility. (from Wikipedia: Benjamin Franklin)