The Secret Of Wealth

There is a man in Chicago who had a small job in a bank. He worked in that bank for forty years and never got more than $26 per week. But that man has a fortune of almost $20,000 accumulated through saving two or three dollars each week and investing it where it earned interest. His annual income from his investments is over $1,000 a year --almost as much as his salary--and he has lived in comfort and brought up and educated a family.

Saving a farm in six years.

On a fifty-acre farm in a fertile part of Indiana, there is the happiest little woman you can find in a long day's journey. Happy--and yet she is so crippled that she can only walk by the help of crutches.

She worked for six years in the city, packing lunch boxes, and through that time she saved her money, putting all she could spare from each week's wages into the bank.

In those six years she saved enough to make a substantial payment on her fifty-acre farm, and to take her mother and herself there and start raising chickens.

After that--don't let us hear anybody who is healthy and strong say he "can't get ahead in the world."

Indeed, after reading that story, who can blame a well-known financier for saying:

"When I hear a man drawing a fair salary complain that he cannot save money, I make up my mind that he doesn't really want to."

A very rich man had a little son who, like other rich men's sons, believed he had only to ask for anything to have it. The father determined to teach the boy the value of money.

The children next door had a pony, and the rich man's little son begged for one like it.

"Well," said the father, "if you had saved the pocket money which has been given you, you could buy a pony now just like that one. Since you have spent your money you must do without the pony."

That was the first time the boy realized that saving his money meant having something he very much wanted, and he began to save. By the time he was fifteen he had enough to buy the pony. But then his father said to him: "Do you remember that fine, big, black horse which Mr. Smith owns? If you save your money about a year longer, you will have enough to buy that horse instead of the pony."

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