MONEY MAKERS.

Matamata Record, Volume VI, Issue 474, 24 September 1923, Page 3

MONEY MAKERS.

Anybody can save; only a few can make money. f All you "have to do, to sav|S money, is to spend less than you got. And any human being that is healthy and "compos mentis" can- live >on, say, nine-tenths of what he is now living on and put the other tenth by. There may be exceptions to this rule; we must grant that for the severely accurate, but they are scarce as a hen's teeth. . It 'is safe to say that those who say they need every cent of what they make, and that it is impossible to save anything at all, are victims of self pity, weak will and bad management. And saving money is about all that most of us can do. And that makes few rich.

Rich people are not those who earn large salaries. They are those who handle money, who make money earn money. Of course, in this argument we exclude two classes—those who have money given them, by inheritance or otherwise, and those who merely get money by chance. These two classes merely step into money someone else has made. But very few people get rich, for the simple reason that money making requires a certain order of genius. Money makers are born. They have a natural gift. They are like poets, mechanicians, orators, artists, in that they are endowed by their Creator with a peculiar capacity. The money makers are the real kings of modern life, because vulgarly we measure all things, including human worth, by cash. If you make three hundred pounds a year at vour job it is only because your employer is making more > than that out of your services. He is the player, you are the chessman. He is the general, you are the private. The best thing for us workers to do is to let money makers alone. Nine times out of ten when we go into that game we are stung. Throughout the world stock exchanges are strewn with the corpses

of-lamb's who thought they could outwit the cunning old wolves that hunt Manv a shopkeeper has been ruined trying' to get rich, not realising that he is not a money maker, but a money earner. ~ , And manv and many a widow has lost all her insurance money by imagining that, being possessed oi a tidy lump sum, she could increase it rapidly by shrewd investment, blie does not understand that in loosely speculating in stocks she « pitting her inexperience against genius and tried ability. Let the natural-born money makeis make money. Let us, you and. me, content ourselves with the only thing wherein we have a prospect of sure success—that is, saving money. Sometimes the money-making faculty is a racial heritage, as amonir the Hebrews. Sometimes it runs in a family, and sometimes it appears sporadically and a money-making genius crops out in tin most unexpected place, just as a Lincoln, a Napoleon or a Leonardo comes from a commonplace environment. The thing for us to remember is that wetting rich is but one small way in which human endeavour succeeds; that those who achieve riches are by no means certainly happy and that their power to acquire luxuries "is usuallv destructive to character. And to remember also that the money savor, if he be intelligent and if he has common sense and philosophy, is practically assured oi I -contentment.