Sukkot, Walmart and the purpose of money
Finance is not merely about making money. It’s about achieving our deep goals and protecting the fruits of our labor. It’s about stewardship and, therefore, about achieving the good society. – Robert J. Shiller
What do the constant pounding of a hammer, hearing an unusual amount of English being spoken in the streets and my teenage son waking up really early have in common? It’s pre-Sukkot time and the tourists are arriving, people are busy building their sukkot and my son is busy selling the Four Species. For all parents of teenagers out there in despair that it’s hard for their kids to wake up and when they do they don’t do anything but sit on the couch, I can tell you there is hope!
Apparently when your child is excited and actually wants to be somewhere around the time that the sun rises, they have the ability to get there without you adding a few white hairs. My oldest son got a job selling the Four Species and needed to be out selling buy 6:30 a.m., and when I woke him up at 5 a.m. he shot up out of bed like a missile. I have never seen him move so fast, let alone at 5 a.m. Maybe they should turn high school into a for-profit venture for the students!
I was recently reading about the massive contribution Walmart has made to the US economy. The article quoted George Will from back in 2006 when he wrote, “Walmart, the most prodigious job-creator in the history of the private sector in this galaxy, has almost as many employees (1.3 million) as the US.military has uniformed personnel. A McKinsey company study concluded that Walmart accounted for 13% of the nation’s productivity gains in the second half of the 1990s, which probably made Walmart about as important as the Federal Reserve in holding down inflation.”
The founder of the company, Sam Walton, was constantly ranked in the Top 5 richest men in the world. His whole life was trying to build a bigger company and make even more money. But on his deathbed he said the most incredible three words; “I blew it.” He regretted that he spent little time with his wife, children and grandchildren. He realized at the very end of his life what many never realize and that is that there is more to life than making as much money as is humanly possible.
I am not against making money. But as I have written numerous times, money is there to serve a purpose. While the bumper sticker “whoever dies with the most amount of money wins” is cute, it goes against the whole concept of money as a conduit to both building a better family life and a better society.
Commenting on the purpose of sitting in the sukka, Rabbi Benjamin Blech writes, “Sukkot was the time when, in the agricultural society of old, farmers found themselves the wealthiest they would be all year. It was the time of the harvest. The granaries were full. They were blessed with far more than their immediate needs. It was their moment of affluenza. So the Torah commanded them to leave their homes and to sit in simple frail huts through whose coverings they could look up at the heavens and remind themselves of the source of their blessings. They needed to recall, in a festival appropriately named “the season of our joy,” that true happiness comes not from our possessions but from our priorities, not from what we own but from who we are, not from our mansions that offer physical comforts but from our families with whom we create everlasting bonds of love and affection.”
It’s for this reason that I constantly preach defining financial goals and needs. By investing intelligently to be able to have more money and then using your money for real purpose, real happiness can be achieved and a better society can be created.
Hag Sameah!
The writer is author of the book Retirement GPS: How to Navigate Your Way to A Secure Financial Future with Global Investing (McGraw-Hill), and is a licensed financial professional both in the United States and Israel. For more information, call (02) 624-0995, visit www.aaronkatsman.com or email aaron@lighthousecapital.co.il.