If
everyone learned from my grandmother about saving, we would have no financial
worries. Let me tell the story.
My
grandmother ran a small store called sari-sari store where she sold meat dishes
she cooked and other common household items. She prepared pork adobo, cicharon
or pork rind and linat-an, stew seasoned with curry. She made chocolate “candy”
for making hot chocolate drink.
She would start by spreading the raw cacao beans on a tray. She would
pick the six biggest beans and put them in a jar. Having set aside a handful of
beans, she then roasted and ground the rest. She rolled a small portion of the
ground product to flatten on the tray until it was dry enough to stuff into a
cookie press. Small chocolate cylinders came out of the press which I wrapped
in wax paper ready to be sold. She made a good yield of chocolate and did not
miss the six cacao beans she had set aside. This process was repeated every
week when she made new batches of chocolate.
At the end of six months, she had saved enough cacao beans to make a
ganta. That amount was sufficient for the fiesta. That’s one item she did not
have to buy. Although what was set aside each week was small, repeated savings
accumulated to a substantial amount. I was so impressed with the experience and
the lesson it brought. It doesn’t deprive us of our normal activity to save a
little each time yet these little savings build up over time.
Suze Orman, an internationally acclaimed personal finance expert,
suggests that when we receive our change in coins after paying with a dollar
bill for something that costs less than a dollar, we set the change aside as
savings.
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The
old adage of “pay yourself first” speaks to
this. We usually think “What can I spend with my salary if I spent every penny
I earned?” We replace this thinking with “Let me put aside a certain amount and
forget its existence” before doing anything else.
I bought a few stocks while working for Abbott Laboratories. After a few
years, the stocks split and doubled without my help. I enrolled in the dividend
reinvestment program and contributed as little as ten to fifty dollars to my
account every three months. My original eight shares grew to a few hundreds.
The more shares I had, the faster my account grew.
This example can be applied to reading books. We do not have huge slots
of time to just sit and read a book. We read a few pages right before going to
sleep. If we carry a book all the time and read a few pages while waiting at
the doctor’s office or standing in line at Costco, without realizing we finish
the book in no time.
In a Montessori class, a child sits down at the language table with the
teacher to learn the sounds of two letters. The lesson is completed in two
minutes. The child comes every day to learn two more sounds. Since there are
only 26 letters of the alphabet and 44 total phonics sounds in the English
language, a four or five year old completes learning the rudiments of reading
in three months. More of this will be addressed in another blog.
What
other examples can you bring to this story? Let me hear from you. If you had
opened a google account, simply click the comment button at the end of this
blog to post your comments. Otherwise, email your comments or questions at
jing13@mac.com.
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