The Secret Of Wealth

"There must be system in the economies. Saving and inexpensiveness will not keep a family from ruin, nor will bigger incomes make free spending safe. The secret of success lies never in the amount of money, but in the relation of income to outgo. But ordinarily, as means increase, spending increases faster, so that large incomes are found not to help matters."

In a certain block of Chicago live scissors grinders, peddlers, factory workers and day laborers, who own eighty apartment buildings. Two factory workers are landlords. A blacksmith owns his home and three other buildings. A barber owns an apartment house.

"Pride keeps more people down than actual want." 

CHAPTER XXXI

"Lift is divided into three terms--that which was, which is and which will be. Let us learn from the past to profit by the present, and from the present to live better for the future."

THE way we learn to walk, to read, to eat, to do anything in life, is through experience--mainly the experience of others, passed on to us.

It is worth while to ask, "How did you do it?" of a man who has made his own way and has arrived at success. A wealthy man who was asked this question replied: "Good wages prevail on every hand, and because money comes easy it goes easy unless it is prevented from slipping away. Saving is a simple matter when one has a plan and follows it. My plan was this: To make an allowance out of my income for each class of expenses, and then to save something out of each allowance. I made it a fixed rule to set aside a certain portion of all money received and looked upon it as a debt which must be paid even though I deprived myself of some much wanted article. Whenever an expenditure appeared to be necessary, I asked myself whether I could not get along without it, and whether it was worth the cost plus the interest on it for the remainder of my life--for once a thing is bought, the money paid for it is gone, and never can be made up."

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