MONEY MAKERS.

Matamata Record, Volume VI, Issue 475, 27 September 1923, Page 1

MONEY MAKERS.

j A WORD TO THE WISE. I Anybody can save; only a few can j make money. I All you have to do, to save money, jis to spend less than you got. And ' any human being- that is healthy and I " compos mentis" can live on, say, 1 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 ac--1 curate, 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 im-' possible 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 your 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 .limes out of ten when we go into that game we are stung. Throughout the world stack exchanges are strewn with the corpses of lambs who thought they could outwit the cunning old wolves that hunt there. Many a shopkeeper has been ruined .trying to get rich, not realising'that' he is not a money maker, but a money earnei-. And many and many a widow has lost all her insurance money by imagining that, being possessed of a. tidy lump sum, she could increase it rapidly by shrewd investment. She does not understand that in loosely speculating" "in "stocks she- is pitting her inexperience against genius andtried ability. Let the natural-born money makers 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 among the Hebrews. Sometimes it runs in a family, antfc sometimes it' appears sporadically and a money-making genius crops out in the most unexpected place, .lust as a Lincoln, a Napoleon or a Leonardo comes from a commonplace environment. The thing for us to remember is that getting rich is but one small way in which human endeavour succeeds; that those who achieve riches arc by no means certainly happy and that their power to acquire luxuries is usually destructive to character. And to remember' also that the money saver, if he be intelligent' and if he has common sense and philosophy, is practically assured. of contentment.