ARE YOU A SAVER OR A SPENDER?
Sep
9
I'M CHECKING MY "EMOTIONAL BALANCE"!
Financial issues highlight the lives of most of the people around me. Why???? Money is a measuring tool, but I never thought of it as measuring my “emotional state”??
Does that mean, when we were taught to save with “piggy banks”, we were also being taught to manage our emotional health?
By the way, why are piggy banks pigs?
They are actually shaped like pigs because they are called piggy banks. You see, In Middle English, "pygg" referred to a type of clay used for making household objects, such as jars. People often saved money in kitchen pots and jars made of pygg, called "pygg jars”.
When I was three-years-old in 1943, I got a tin “piggy bank” for my birthday, a globe of the world. We lived on a farm near Caldwell, Idaho, in an area called Sand Hollow. Mom, Dad, me, my grandpa and two uncles all lived together. My twenty-year-old Uncle Frank was the social one. He had a bunch of friends that came from the Minidoka Camp where the Japanese were incarcerated and worked on our farm. When they finished their work on Saturday, washed up, ate and came out of the kitchen, I remember sitting in this bay window in the living room and they would each give me a nickel. At that time, I was taught to save nickels for college.
When I was seven-years-old, my Mom took me to town and I bought a twenty-five-dollar savings bond that would mature in ten years. I think I paid something like sixteen dollars. I did cash it in when I went to Lewis and Clark College ($25 in 1956 = $235 in 2018).
I learned early to be a saver. Maybe, it is a good practice today to save for the “college of learning” for emotional balance?
