My First Lesson on Budgeting & Living Debt Free

My first lesson on budgeting came thirty some years ago...did I seriously just write that, how did I get this old? Sorry ya'all I need a moment.

Ok, I'm back. I will start with a little background. When I was young we had these things called convenience stores. Yes I know we have a QT, BP, and Exxon etc on every corner now but that is not how it use to be. These convenience stores were owned by individuals (mom and pops) and they sold only a few things, milk, bread, eggs, tuna & sugar. In our neighborhood in north Utica we had the "little brown store" and the "milk store" which always had the best milk prices in town. This was a time when your mom/dad would give a kid $1.00 and send them to the store. We would walk or ride our bikes to the store and buy the eggs...can you imagine doing that today? These people who ran these shops were very smart because the other item they sold was penny & 2 cent candy. They knew that the kids would come down with their dollar, buy 90 cents of eggs and of course the kids would pick out 5 pieces of candy to spend the remaining 10 cents. Nobody sells that stuff anymore because today the parents drive to the store and buy the stuff with a debit card. Ah, the good old days.

Back to my lesson: when I was 7 we lived in Rochester NY and my grandparents lived in Utica, which is about 2 hours away. When we visited our grandparents my grandpa would give me a dime and sometime 15 cents to go to the store and get some candy. I still remember this because my grandpa had this rubber thing that he kept his change in. You all know what I am talking about. It was slit open on top and you would squeeze the ends to push the opening wide and inside was your change. The one thing that I did besides eat candy was I collected football cards. A package of cards cost 25-30 cents each at the time so one day I asked my grandpa for 30 cents to buy football cards instead of the normal 15 cents. He said, no. I don’t think he ever said no to me before. He told me that I shouldn't buy something if I don’t have my own money to buy it (sound familiar?)

He told me that if I really wanted something that I did not have the money for I had to save up money to buy it. He explained to me that if I kept the 15 cents he would give me on that day I would be able to get football cards next time I came because he would give me 15 cents during our next visit. I was 7 and this was brutal. I had to watch my brother and our friends go to the store, buy (and even worse) eat candy…my brother is older so of course he didn’t share. Remember that we lived 2 hours away so I didn’t know when we would get back to their house.

Well I saved that money. I did this mostly because I thought my grandpa was the smartest man in the world and if I came back to his house without my money he would have been disappointed and that would have killed me. When I got to his house for our next visit I showed him the money and he gave me the other 15 cents. I ran to the store and bought my football cards. When I got back to the house I got to show him the cards I got. At this point a lesson was taught to me that has stayed with me for my entire life. He sat with me looking at the cards and said (not an exact quote), “if you had bought candy it would have been gone by the time you got back to the house. But because you saved your money you now have these cards that you can share and look at for a long time.” He followed this with the true lesson, “sometimes you have to put off today what you think you want so that you can get what you really want tomorrow and not owe somebody else for it.” I don’t remember exactly what cards they were but I bet you I studied the stats on the back of the cards all the way home in the car. (Side note, I kept my cards for 25 years until I finally sold them).

Today we call this “delayed gratification.” 30+ years ago I had really no idea what my grandpa was saying because I was enjoying my cards. But somehow this has stuck and I have lived my next 30+ years with this mentality and with only a few exceptions have I ever bought for instant gratification and gone into debt. Today we live debt free…thank you Grandpa!!

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Steven Mutton

President Liquid PFE