Even a saving of one dollar a week from the date of one's majority would give him one thousand dollars for each of the last ten of the allotted years of life.
"What maintains one vice would bring up two children." Who does not feel honored by his relationship to Dr.Franklin, whether as a townsman or a countryman, or even as belonging to the same race?
Who does not feel a sort of personal complacency in that frugality of his youth which laid the foundation for so much competence and generosity in his mature age; in that wise discrimination of his outlays, which held the culture of the soul in absolute supremacy over the pleasures of the sense; and in that consummate mastership of the great art of living, which has carried his practical wisdom into every cottage in Christendom, and made his name immortal?
And yet, how few there are among us who would not disparage, nay, ridicule and contemn a young man who should follow Franklin's example.
Washington examined the minutest expenditures of his family, even when President of the United States.

He understood that without economy none can be rich, and with it none need be poor.
Napoleon examined his domestic bills himself, detected overcharges and errors.
Unfortunately Congress can pass no law that will remedy the vice of living beyond one's means.
"We are ruined," says Colton, "not by what we really want, but by what we think we do.

Therefore never go abroad in search of your wants; if they be real wants, they will come home in search of you; for he that buys what he does not want will soon want what he cannot buy." "I hope that there will not be another sale," exclaimed Horace Walpole, "for I have not an inch of room nor a farthing left." A woman once bought an old door-plate with "Thompson" on it because she thought it might come in handy some time.

The habit of buying what you don't need because it is cheap encourages extravagance.

"Many have been ruined by buying good pennyworths." Barnum tells the story of one of his acquaintances, whose wife would have a new and elegant sofa, which in the end cost him thirty thousand dollars.