Saturday Evening Post (5 April 1924)
Table of Contents
“You ought to start saving money,” The Young Man With a Future assured me just the other day. “You think it’s smart to live up to your income. Some day you’ll land in the poorhouse.”
I was bored, but I knew he was going to tell me anyhow, so I asked him what I’d better do.
“It’s very simple,” he answered impatiently; “only you establish a trust fund where you can’t get your money if you try.”
I had heard this before. It is System Number 999. I tried System Number 1 at the very beginning of my literary career four years ago. A month before I was married I went to a broker and asked his advice about investing some money.
“It’s only a thousand,” I admitted, “but I feel I ought to begin to save right now.”
He considered.
“You don’t want Liberty Bonds,” he said. “They’re too easy to turn into cash. You want a good, sound, conservative investment, but also you want it where you can’t get at it every five minutes.”
He finally selected a bond for me that paid 7 per cent and wasn’t listed on the market I turned over my thousand dollars, and my career of amassing capital began that day.
On that day, also, it ended.
The Heirloom No One Would Buy
My wife and I were married in New York in the spring of 1920, when prices were higher than they had been within the memory of man. In the light of after events it seems fitting that our career should have started at that precise point in time. I had just received a large check from the movies and I felt a little patronizing toward the millionaires riding down Fifth Avenue in their limousines—because my income had a way of doubling every month. This was actually the case. It had done so for several months—I had made only thirty-five dollars the previous August, while here in April I was making three thousand—and it seemed as if it was going to do so forever. At the end of the year it must reach half a million. Of course with such a state of affairs, economy seemed a waste of time. So we went to live at the most expensive hotel in New York, intending to wait there until enough money accumulated for a trip abroad.
To make a long story short, after we had been married for three months I found one day to my horror that I didn’t have a dollar in the world, and the weekly hotel bill for two hundred dollars would be due next day.
I remember the mixed feelings with which I issued from the bank on hearing the news.
“What’s the matter?” demanded my wife anxiously, as I joined her on the sidewalk. “You look depressed.”
“I’m not depressed,” I answered cheerfully; “I’m just surprised. We haven’t got any money.”
“Haven’t got any money,” she repeated calmly, and we began to walk up the Avenue in a sort of trance. “Well, let’s go to the movies,” she suggested jovially.
It all seemed so tranquil that I was not a bit cast down. The cashier had not even scowled at me. I had walked in and said to him, “How much money have I got?” And he had looked in a big book and answered, “None.”
That was all. There were no harsh words, no blows. And I knew that there was nothing to worry about. I was now a successful author, and when successful authors ran out of money all they had to do was to sign checks. I wasn’t poor—they couldn’t fool me. Poverty meant being depressed and living in a small remote room and eating at a rotisserie on the corner, while I—why, it was impossible that I should be poor! I was living at the best hotel in New York!
My first step was to try to sell my only possession—my $1000 bond. It was the first of many times I made the attempt; in all financial crises I dig it out and with it go hopefully to the bank, supposing that, as it never fails to pay the proper interest, it has at last assumed a tangible value. But as I have never been able to sell it, it has gradually acquired the sacredness of a family heirloom. It is always referred to by my wife as “your bond,” and it was once turned in at the Subway offices after I left it by accident on a car seat!
This particular crisis passed next morning when the discovery that publishers sometimes advance royalties sent me hurriedly to mine. So the only lesson I learned from it was that my money usually turns up somewhere in time of need, and that at the worst you can always borrow—a lesson that would make Benjamin Franklin turn over in his grave.
For the first three years of our marriage our income averaged a little more than $20, 000 a year. We indulged in such luxuries as a baby and a trip to Europe, and always money seemed to come easier and easier with less and less effort, until we felt that with just a little more margin to come and go on, we could begin to save.
Plans
We left the Middle West and moved East to a town about fifteen miles from New York, where we rented a house for $300 a month. We hired a nurse for $90 a month; a man and his wife—they acted as butler, chauffeur, yard man, cook, parlor maid and chamber maid—for $160 a month; and a laundress, who came twice a week, for $36 a month. This year of 1923, we told each other, was to be our saving year. We were going to earn $24, 000, and live on $18, 000, thus giving us a surplus of $6, 600 with which to buy safety and security for our old age. We were going to do better at last.
Now as everyone knows, when you want to do better you first buy a book and print your name in the front of it in capital letters. So my wife bought a book, and every bill that came to the house was carefully entered in it, so that we could watch living expenses and cut them away to almost nothing—or at least to $1, 500 a month.
We had, however, reckoned without our town. It is one of those little towns springing up on all sides of New York which are built especially for those who have made money suddenly but have never had money before.