With banks and other financial institutions going belly up left and right this week, everyone's focus is on the current financial crisis. To sum up all of the analysts, debt - from homes, cars, credit cards and other loans - is the problem. As I watch the nightly news and hear all of the financial doom and gloom, I think back to when I was a kid when I had no debt, and all I had in my financial portfolio was a passbook savings account.
When I was 7 years old, the 'Rents took me with them to Citizens Fidelity Bank where they did their banking, and I opened a savings account with some money I'd received for my birthday. The 'Rents and Grandma and Grandpa said they'd give me an extra dollar in my allowance with the stipulation that I put the extra buck in my savings account every week. How cool was that? It was a win-win situation for a 7 year old -- I was getting the same amount of allowance, plus an extra buck to save. So saving money wasn't really costing me anything.
Every Friday evening when Mom and Dad would go to the bank to deposit part of their weekly pay, they would take me along and I would deposit my dollar. I felt like 70's equivalent of Donald Trump when I would present my savings book to the teller and she'd stamp it with the date and write down the amount of my deposit and then initial it. I might as well have been depositing a hundred bucks.
I kept that savings account until my early twenties, when Citizens Fidelity was sold out and PNC Bank took over. But I still have my little savings account book in my cedar chest. As I look ahead to the future and am putting together a plan to get totally out of debt in 2009, I sure wish I'd kept that same discipline of saving every week. But it's never too late to save.
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