Try livin’ like our grandparents

When Beth Pitney was a little girl, her dad owned a hardware store in small-town California. He had bought half an acre of land, and the family planned to build a house on it. Then the Great Depression hit.

“Instead of building a house, we moved into the back of the store,” Pitney recounted from her cozy apartment in the elegant Terraces Senior Living complex on the east side of Chico.

Her mother, who worked picking fruit in the orchards, put her daughter to work alongside her around the age of 13. “It seems like I’ve been working ever since,” she said with a chuckle.

Back in the 1930s, times were tough. In many ways, they were tougher then than they are now. But one thing that generation didn’t have was credit. Credit has made it possible to not just be broke, but to get thousands—even tens of thousands—of dollars in over our heads. According to a Bloomberg News report, the percentage of borrowers now who are overdue on their bills is at a 17-year high. Unemployment is at a 25-year high.

So, what are we doing wrong? Maybe we can learn a few things from our elders, people who have lived through tougher times and came out just fine.

“We were just brought up knowing how to take care of money,” said Philip Rowberg, relaxed in the Terraces’ main lobby. “If you didn’t take care of that, you’d probably go to the poor house.”

Rowberg’s story, while different from Pitney’s, has similarities that can’t be ignored. Growing up in Minnesota, Rowberg went to work young, helping out his dad on the family farm. “We all had to do our part,” he said.

“When I went to college, I worked,” he added, “and I paid for a good share of my education.”

Pitney did the same. When she was in high school, she started working at the library after school and on Saturdays. She earned $25 a month. Of that, $10 went into savings. The rest was split between her own spending money and her parents’ family expenses. And by the time she was old enough to go to college, she was able to put herself through two years at a junior college and then two years at UC Berkeley. The savings had paid off.

Neither Pitney nor Rowberg took out a loan to go to school or buy a house. Their parents put them to work instead of using credit to pay for groceries (credit cards as we know them didn’t exist until the 1950s). And extra money went into savings rather than frivolities—so when the time came to buy a house, or go to school, there was money there waiting to be spent.

“If I hadn’t saved my whole life, I probably wouldn’t be able to live here,” Pitney said, looking around her tidy apartment. “We had to watch our money. I think that’s why our generation turned out to be so independent.”

As for the current state of affairs: “We already went through one [depression],” Pitney quipped, “I don’t think it’s fair that we have to go through another one.”