A penny saved is a penny earned

Now to treat the second half of the well put idea by Mrs. Child:
..and whatever be the size of a family, every member should be employed either in earning or saving money.

My father was a the prototype for the miserly father always spouting of some little catch phrase about saving money. Whenever he passed a room he would shut off the light, wheter the room was occupied or not, and say "Saves electricity." If we ever protested from the dark he would casually remark, "A penny saved is a penny earned." This well saved penny was also kept as a reward for hard, or tedious, work. After harvesting the crusted chili bean plants from the garden, Dad would offer us two pennies for every red bean that was picked out of the dirt. The stakes were higher for stacking wood, one penny for each log neatly put on the stack. If ever we dared to protest our wages Dad would say "A penny earned is a penny saved."

I am certain today children would smirk at the thought of sitting in the garden and picking one bean after the next out of the dirt. But I grew up in the golden age of penny candy. You knew just exactly the great reward you would receive as each penny would trade shape for a swedish fish, a sweet and sour gum drop, or those sugar filled raspberry treats. Buckets full of candy were at your figertips as long as you had the penny to back it up! You can certainly say that money has been inflated when no longer can children salivate while piling log after log onto their skinny little arms hoping to make the most of their trip from the back of the truck to the log pile. The dollar has dipped below working value now that little fingers cannot enjoy the simple joy of counting out, one dirty handful by the next, each penny earned.

It wasn't enough that we were offered opportunities to earn money (some might jeeringly think we were forced into early child labor working so brutally hard for just pennies on the log), but we were all expected to maintain a financial standard: one-tenth of our earnings were to be donated as tithing to the Church, another fifteen percent of the total earnings was deposited directly into our proud checking account at First Security Bank. I still have that maroon colored plastic statement holder with the meager balance from my early days calculated out in small deposits and then large withdrawls. We were not allowed to take money out of the bank for just anything. It had to be a calculated, worthwhile, well thought through purchase before we were permitted to take out a large balance of our earnings. I could track each purchase in that book of my past with the anticipation of what I was working for: summer camps, a mountain bike with shocks, that favorite prom dress. There was no overdraft protection then to laze you into overspending what you didn't have, you knew exactly what went in and what went out.

Two principles were taught in Dad's "a penny saved is a penny earned' and "a penny earned is a penny saved." First - it would always be a lot easier to save the money you had than it would be to earn more (seeing how his standard for payment was not going to inflate with the economy, even at 15 years old the payment was still a penny a log). Second - it is worth earning any penny you could, any work is good work. What went unsaid many times was if we were to protest too much the work ahead, it would just become mandated and the prize of a penny taken away. Better to work for pennies than peanuts, and better to work for peanuts than for nothing.

This is really seeming to run circularly through my reminscent days of childhood pay, I must drive to the point. Everyone should work. Yes, that means children too. It is not slave labor and your home is defenately not a sweat shop. If you don't teach them to work, who will? They will learn to feel entitled, falsely believing that they deserve anything they want just by virtue of who they are. It is a sin to get something for nothing that breeds gluttony and selfishness. That is a trait you can garauntee society won't miss teaching your children with the barrage of 'no payment down' and limitless credit cards. A child who is not taught as when young to work for his money and save it well is not only a burden to the family, but will be to society later on. i could rampage against our societal woes brought on by this failing parental responsibility to teach their children the value of saving well and spending wisely. That is not today's point. The point is - everyone should be employed in the family either saving or earning money for themselves of for the good of the family.