My father used to tell me when I was a young boy, "Pray that there never is another Great Depression!". He would go on to say things like, "A loaf of bread would only cost 5 cents, and boy, how we wished we could get our hands on a nickel." No doubt about it, the depression was a tough time to live through, and my parents generation never forgot the lessons they learned from it.
They learned to be frugal, to the point of pinching pennies until they screamed. They didn't buy things until they had the money to pay for it, and they didn't believe in debt. My parents were in that club that canned the vegetables they grew in the old 'Victory Garden", who went to the bank every month to make the mortgage payment, and had a party where they actually burned the paid off note. Compare their lives to the generations that came after them; the Yuppies, the Generations X and Y, the Internet Generation and whatever else we've spawned in recent times.
Being a Baby Boomer myself, I have a much better sense of how the depression era generation approached life than those that followed us. I remember how frugal my parents used to, even had to be. With the economy being characterized as being in the worst shape since the Great Depression, the national debt ballooning to the largest in history, all of us are going to be making changes in our attitudes about debt, money, and consumerism. The time has come for all of us to remember how to live like my parents generation lived.
Unfortunately, the stimulus plan is designed to have us perpetuate the lifestyles of the present, rather than to emulate the discipline of our forebears.
In spite of the urging of the pundits for Americans to begin borrowing and spending our way out of the economic slowdown, I am making personal vows to change the way I live, and spend, and consume:
- I will not use credit unless absolutely necessary
- Before I make any kind of purchase, I will determine if the purchase is absolutely necessary
- I will pay off my debts
- I will reassess my spending priorities. I can give to a charity before buying unneeded junk..
- I will use my savings account to actually save
- I will be responsible for the financial consequences of my decisions
That being said, I hope that by sharing my personal reassessment and lifestyle choices, you might be moved to make changes of your own. I am sure that if everyone made the choices I am making, the economy would probably go into a steepr decline, and take even longer to recover. However, I am just one person, and the decisions I am making will require commitment and discipline to have any results.
I really think there aren't enough of us that have the discipline and resolve to make these choices, to result in a noticeable negative effect on the larger dynamics of the nations economy. After all, discipline, responsibility and resolve...these were qualities of the generation of our fathers, not ours.
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