Sec. 9. #Collection of savings and education in thrift.# Small savings have been encouraged in many places by penny provident funds, dime savings banks, and school savings funds, which have been conducted at public schools, social settlements, and factories, by school officers and by charitable and educational societies acting through canvassers.  These plans all call for much personal effort and cost, which must be provided by volunteer services and private gifts.  These plans being undertaken mainly as a means of education in thrift and in the related moralities, their results are not to be measured merely by the magnitude of the sums collected.  They are not rivals of the ordinary savings banks, but rather auxiliary methods of encouraging their use.  The funds collected by these agencies are usually deposited in local savings banks, and depositors are encouraged to open individual accounts there, whenever they have considerable sums saved.

In Germany the public schools have been furnished with automatic stamp vending machines, from which savings stamps in as small denominations as ten pfennigs (2-1/2 cents) may be had by dropping a coin into a slot.[10] This method could be used very effectively in connection either with the postal savings system or with a local savings bank.  It ought to be made easy to deposit funds at every school house, at every post-office, at every factory counter on pay day, and wherever people pass in numbers.  Allurements to foolish expenditures meet old and young at every turn; to spend the dime is made all too easy, whereas to save it and deposit it in a safe place too often calls for wasteful and discouraging efforts from the person of small means.

Sec. 10. #Building and loan associations.# Building and loan association is the name applied to a cooeperative organization of persons with the purpose of collecting regularly from members small sums which are loaned to some members for the purpose of building or paying for homes.[11] The first association of this type was organized in Frankford, Pennsylvania, in 1831.  It and others of its kind have made Philadelphia notable among all the larger cities as “the city of homes.”  The number of such associations has almost steadily increased in the United States.  Pennsylvania continues to rank first in respect to amount of total assets, with Ohio a close second, and New Jersey third (the ranking first in proportion to population).  Associations of this type have been hardly second in importance in America to the savings banks as institutions for savings for persons of moderate means.  The number of their members (nearly 3,000,000) is about one-fourth of that of savings bank depositors, and the amount of their assets (1-1/4 billion dollars) is about one-fourth that of the reported savings banks.  But their relative influence in educating and encouraging to thrift is doubtless much greater than these figures indicate.  There are more than three times as many of them as