The Secret Of Wealth

Buy for quality. Forget the price. Select the goods first. Ask the price afterward. You will be surprised at how many times you will have selected the less expensive article by using quality as your guide.

"In prosperity prepare for a change; in adversity hope for one."--Burgh.

"He is a benefactor of mankind who contracts the great rules of life into short sentences, that may be easily impressed on the memory, and so recur habitually to the mind."-- Johnson. 

CHAPTER XII

"There is wisdom in generosity, as in everything else--a friend to everybody is often a friend to nobody; or else, in his simplicity, he robs his family to help strangers, and so becomes brother to a beggar."--Spurgeon.

NOT long ago a leading financial newspaper carried the story of a man in New York who went into bankruptcy. His assets were $10, and he owed $93,230, of which amount $61,500 had been borrowed from his friends during a period of seven years.

The newspaper story directed attention to the fact that many people live on other people's money and enjoy the leisure which rightfully belongs to those others.

This was undoubtedly an extreme case, but the method of operation is not at all uncommon. Lending back and forth between acquaintances employed in the same establishment is a bad enough practice for both lender and borrower, but lending money to every Tom, Dick and Harry is a ruinous practice for both borrower and lender. Such loans destroy friendships and create coolness between acquaintances much more than a refusal of the loan.

Another man who failed listed among his assets $18,160, which he had loaned to various relatives, friends and acquaintances without security of any kind. The receiver in the case collected less than $500 of the total amount, as many of the loans could not even be proved. No notes had been taken and no promises to repay had even been made. One former friend testified that the $1,500 claimed from him had been paid to him as a commission on a deal and denied any indebtedness to the bankrupt.

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