Posts tagged ‘spending’
NEWARK MEMORY: LIFE ON A SHOESTRING
We have just finished the annual ‘season of shopping’. What follows are some shopping memories, a time when you only bought what you could afford.
LIFE ON A SHOESTRING
Some time ago I heard a report which stated that the average person carries about eight thousand dollars in debt. I am sure that that amount has increased since then. I have only a couple credit cards and try to keep my debt under control. I also use my credit cards as seldom as possible for they can be easily compromised. But on hearing this broadcast, my mind wandered back to my youth, a time when people not so much lived without but lived with what they could afford.
For most of my youth credit cards did not even exist. They started flourishing in the 60’s so, when I was young, they were not even an option. My parents didn’t even have a checking account. When there was a bill that needed to be paid we went to the drugstore and got a money order. Money orders were the only way we sent money through the mail.
In my neighborhood, credit was not as much a way of life as it is today. People lived on what they could afford. With the exception of houses and cars, you bought what you could pay for then and there. I must admit just writing about life without credit seems so foreign and unreal. Buying just what you can afford seems like such an odd concept, yet that is the way it once was.
The way a person received their pay was also different in my youth. Friday afternoons, my dad was home from working at the tannery for hours, but he had to return Friday afternoons to get his pay. I would sometimes take a ride with him; you could smell his place of employment long before you could see it – Ocean Leather – gaining this name because it was the only tannery at that time that could tan shark skins. We would drive around to the loading dock where drums of chemicals stood, the soil, stained shades of purple and green was soil to be an OSHA nightmare. So, into the building we would go, past large rooms where various stages of tanning was taking place, and into the office. Here my dad was handed a brown envelope with bills and change and that was his pay. That’s the way people were paid back then; you actually held your pay in your hand. It was not electronically sent to your bank from which you electronically paid your bills. You were able to hold what you earned, actually see it.
Friday was also allowance day for me, as it is now for my children. For completing my choirs, I received fifty cents a week, and when I could really control my spending – not wanting another model or book – I turned those quarters into a dollar bill, real folding money, which I would immediately take to the cellar and hide. In some respects, I never did get over the hiding fetish. I still have hordes of Kennedy quarters and half dollars along with a plastic bag stashed away for the new state quarters being minted. To this day a quarter to me is still real money. Although my kids make fun of my concept of value, with a quarter in my pocket I’m okay. How things have changed, and how I remain the same.
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