The Art of Money Getting: Spend Less Than You Earn

P. T. Barnum was the most famous showman in nineteenth-century America, the man behind a giant New York museum and, later, the circus he called “The Greatest Show on Earth.”He made a fortune, lost nearly all of it through a bad investment, and earned it back again, so he knew from experience how hard money is to keep.He gave a lecture called “The Art of Money Getting” to crowds in America and Britain, and later published it as a short book.

“In a country with more land than people, it is not difficult for anyone who is healthy and willing to work to make money. The hard thing is to keep it.The road to wealth, as Dr. Franklin says, is as plain as the road to the mill: it consists simply in spending less than we earn.Mr. Micawber, in Dickens’s novel, puts it well: to earn twenty pounds a year and spend twenty pounds and sixpence is to be the most miserable of men, while to earn twenty pounds and spend nineteen pounds and sixpence is to be the happiest.

Many people think they understand economy when they do not. Economy is not meanness, and saving candle ends while you waste money elsewhere is not economy at all.I have known a farmer’s wife who would not light a second candle for her guest to read by, yet thought nothing of going to the village to spend thirty dollars on ribbons she did not need.That is what we call being ‘penny wise and pound foolish.’

True economy means always making your income greater than your spending. Wear the old clothes a little longer, mend the old dress, and live on plainer food if you must.If you have a good income but nothing left at the end of the year, here is my cure: write down every item you spend money on, in two columns, one for necessities and one for luxuries.You will find that the second column is double, three times, and often ten times bigger than the first.

It is the eyes of others, not our own eyes, that ruin us. Many families stay poor because they try to keep up appearances and match their richer neighbors.A rich gentleman I know told me that one elegant sofa his wife bought cost him thirty thousand dollars: the chairs had to match the sofa, the tables had to match the chairs, and at last a new house had to be built to match them all.”