Cash is King

Yesterday we had a visitor from Italy for lunch. The news from the north is rather grim – depressed economy, high taxes, property prices down and more and more young people living on welfare since it is almost not worth working when you have to give away 70% of your salary to the taxman. 

I remember as a young girl that my grandfather always preached that “Cash was King”. He firmly believed that you should pay cash for everything and avoid getting into debt. His maxim was that if you couldn’t afford to pay cash for it, you should go without it or wait until you had saved the money. My fondest memory of him is of how he saved up his coins at the end of every day in a little money box that he kept in his cupboard, for my education. 

The banks have convinced us that it is alright to have things that we cannot afford, and they have lent money to us, allowing us to go into debt to get what we want. And now here we are in one big mess. Seems we should have listened to the old folks more closely.