Lessons from your grandparents
We’ve lost sight of money know-how that our forebears practised day in, day out
We like to talk about the good old days. Life was simpler. There was more time to think. True, if you count the time you had to think as you smashed the laundry on the rocks down by the river. Or the simplicity of hanging your laundry out on the line in -40 C weather.
I’ll give you that our grandparents had a different life. And while we’ve outpaced our grands in terms of the number of toys we have and the conveniences we can now employ, we’ve lost sight of a bunch of lessons we should have taken from them. Like these: Don’t buy stuff you can’t pay for: Truth is our grands didn’t have much choice on this one. Credit cards didn’t come to Canada until the mid-1960s, and the line of credit wasn’t handed out to every Tom, Dick and Harriet until the mid-1980s. So the best our grands could do was run a tab at a local store. By and large, if they didn’t have the money to pay for a thing, they simply had to do without it.
Things have multiple uses: Granny didn’t have a knife that only peeled potatoes, cut apples or slice avocados. Now we have a tool with a specific use for just about everything we do. And just because a thing got old didn’t mean Gramps dumped it; he would repurpose just about anything he could lay his hands on to do a job for which it was not initially intended. Fix it yourself: The ability to fix things resides with those who don’t have the money to hire someone else to do it. My former next-door neighbour could fix anything. It didn’t matter how broken it was, Ron would find the pieces and the stick-it to make it whole again.
Now that it’s so easy to buy a new one, most of us don’t bother fixing stuff. And since manufacturers know we’ll buy a new one, they keep shortening the life expectancy on the stuff they’re making. It’s almost to the point where you can chuck the whole thing in the garbage before you take it out of the box. Function beats fashion: Grandma may not have worn the most stylish shoes, but she got her money’s worth out of them. She wore those puppies until they needed new soles, then she handed them to Grandpa who fixed ’em so she could wear them some more.
How many pairs of shoes do you have? And how often do you wear out a pair of shoes before you buy another? Ditto handbags, jeans, shirts, jackets, watches, cellphones, TVs . . . and everything else we throw money at. If you don’t save some money, you won’t have any: Our grands didn’t need tax incentives to save money. They knew that if they didn’t put 10 cents aside when they earned a dollar, come time to hang up their axes there’d be nothing to buy food with. Such a simple idea. So sensible. They knew that saving money wasn’t optional.