“The world is full of people who can’t imagine why they don’t prosper like their neighbors, when the real obstacle is not in the banks nor tariffs, in bad public policy nor hard times, but in their own extravagance and heedless ostentation.  The young mechanic or clerk marries and takes a house, which he proceeds to furnish twice as expensively as he can afford; and then his wife, instead of taking hold to help him earn a livelihood by doing her own work, must have a hired servant to help her spend his limited earnings.  Ten years afterward, you will find him struggling on under a double load of debts and children, wondering why the luck was always against him, while his friends regret his unhappy destitution of financial ability.  Had they, from the first, been frank and honest, he need not have been so unlucky.

“Through every grade of society this vice of inordinate expenditure insinuates itself.  The single man ‘hired out’ in the country at ten to fifteen dollars per month, who contrives to dissolve his year’s earnings in frolics and fine clothes; the clerk who has three to five hundred dollars a year, and melts down twenty to fifty of it into liquor and cigars, are paralleled by the young merchant who fills a spacious house with costly furniture, gives dinners, and drives a fast horse, on the strength of the profits he expects to realize when his goods are all sold and his notes all paid.  Let a man have a genius for spending, and whether his income is a dollar a day or a dollar a minute, it is equally certain to prove inadequate.  If dining, wining, and party-giving won’t help him through with it, building, gaming, and speculation will be sure to.  The bottomless pocket will never fill, no matter how bounteous the stream pouring into it.  The man who (being single) does not save money on six dollars a week, will not be apt to on sixty; and he who does not lay up something in his first year of independent exertion, will be pretty likely to wear a poor man’s hair into his grave.

“No man who has the natural use of his faculties and his muscles, has any right to tax others with the cost of his support, as this class of non-financial gentlemen habitually do.  It is their common mistake to fancy that if a debt is only paid at last, the obligation of the debtor is fulfilled; but the fact is not so.  A man who sells his property for another’s promise to pay next week or next month, and is compelled to wear out a pair of boots in running after his due, which he finally gets after a year or two, is never really paid.  Very often, he has lost half the face of his demand, by not having the money when he needed it, beside the cost and vexation of running after it.  There is just one way to pay an obligation in full, and that is to pay it when due.  He who keeps up a running fight with bills and loans through life, is continually living on other men’s means, is a serious burden and a detriment to those who deal with him, although his estate should finally pay every dollar of his legal obligations.