The Way to Wealth

BEN FRANKLIN WROTE the most popular personal finance text of the 18th century. Originally published in 1758 as an essay in his Poor Richard���s Almanack, it became a perennial bestseller when printed separately under the title The Way to Wealth.

You can read the 1810 version printed in London at no charge, thanks to Project Gutenberg. I assign it to students in my behavioral economics class, and it sparks a discussion about whether thrift and hard work are still the routes to financial security. Franklin's story begins with a distinctly modern tone.

While waiting for an auction to start, a group of neighbors complains that their taxes are too high and will ruin the country. They ask a wise man, called Father Abraham, to advise them. He climbs up on a tree stump and agrees that taxes are high���and then adds this retort: ���We are taxed twice as much by our idleness, three times as much by our pride, and four times as much by our folly.���

Then he���s off and running on a rhyming rap that strings together many of the best-known sayings on thrift, industry and saving in the English language. Interestingly, it doesn���t include the quote most often attributed to Franklin, which I���ll add at the end.

Here are 10 sayings from the story. A couple are still widely known even after two centuries:

���Early to bed, and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise."
"Never leave that till tomorrow, which you can do today."
���There are no gains without pains.���
"What maintains one vice, would bring up two children."
"Sloth makes all things difficult, but industry all easy; and he that riseth late, must trot all day, and shall scarce overtake his business at night; while laziness travels so slowly, that poverty soon overtakes him.���
"Employ thy time well, if thou meanest to gain leisure; and, since thou art not sure of a minute, throw not away an hour."
���When you have bought one fine thing, you must buy 10 more, that your appearance may be all of a piece.���
���It is as truly a folly for the poor to ape the rich, as for the frog to swell, in order to equal the ox.���
���If you would be wealthy, think of saving, as well as of getting. The Indies have not made Spain rich, because her out-goes are greater than her incomes."
"For age and want save while you may, no morning sun lasts a whole day."

The rhyming couplets are easy to remember but hard to obey. Mark Twain complained in an 1870 essay that Franklin���s maxims marred his childhood. ���The boy is hounded to death and robbed of his natural rest,��� Twain wrote, ���because Franklin, said once, in one of his inspired flights to malignity: Early to bed and early to rise make a man healthy, wealthy and wise.���

Even Franklin honored his sayings only intermittently. He caused a sensation when he wore a plain brown coat and no wig when presented to King Louis XVI as the U.S. ambassador to the court of Versailles. Yet he also lived in a nearby mansion, where he kept nine servants, including a coachman, gardener and cook.

Franklin concedes that his good advice will be ignored, as he reveals in the story���s ending: ���Thus the old gentleman ended his harangue. The people heard it, and approved the doctrine, and immediately practised the contrary, just as if it had been a common sermon; for the auction opened, and they began to buy extravagantly.���

The oft-quoted saying that doesn���t appear anywhere in The Way to Wealth is, ���A penny saved is a penny earned.��� According to Philadelphia���s Franklin Institute, the closest Franklin came to penning those words was in his 1737 Poor Richard���s Almanack, in which he wrote, ���A penny saved is two pence clear.���

Paradoxically, to honor him, visitors pitch pennies onto the gravestone erected after Franklin���s death in 1790. Christ Church Philadelphia even undertook a Gofundme campaign to, among other things, repair the damage from the penny pelting. I imagine that Franklin would be pleased to be remembered for so long, even if his admirers throw away his best-known advice.

Greg Spears is HumbleDollar's��deputy editor.��Earlier in his career, he worked as a reporter for the Knight Ridder Washington Bureau and Kiplinger���s Personal Finance magazine. After leaving journalism, Greg spent 23 years as a senior editor at Vanguard Group on the 401(k) side, where he implored people to save more for retirement. He currently teaches behavioral economics at St. Joseph���s University in Philadelphia as an adjunct professor. The subject helps shed light on why so many Americans save less than they might. Greg is also a Certified Financial Planner certificate holder. Check out his earlier articles.

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