Money isn’t everything

Suze Orman says it. So do the other financial advisors I see in magazines, newspapers and on television. It keeps popping up. The advice is this: Take care of yourself first; only after you are sure that your financial future is secure do you help anyone else.

The analogy adored by the money pundits is plucked from emergency procedures given to airline passengers: Put on your own oxygen mask before helping the child seated next to you with his. They tell people this as if the two-second interval in a flight emergency is the equivalent of sending your child to college, helping your laid-off neighbor with groceries or paying your mother’s utilities so her power isn’t cut off.

I understand that there are tax advantages to putting money toward your own retirement instead of paying your child’s college tuition. Perhaps the tax system should not be structured the way it is, but as it stands, it is to your advantage to put money into retirement before helping your children. I get it, but I still don’t understand why no one is questioning this conventional wisdom. It flies in the face of how families have lived throughout history. It goes against the grain of every religious tradition I know anything about. It goes against a lot of my experience.

When my great-grandfather died, his farm had to be sold because he had borrowed money to send children to college. He didn’t leave the family destitute; his widow was able to move to the nearest town, get a house, and support the last child remaining at home. However, had he followed Suze Orman’s advice, his children would have never gone to college. Fewer of his grandchildren might have gone as well. I think the outcome for the family was better because of the decisions he made.

When my mother was in her 20s, she and her three siblings decided that it was time for their mother to quit working and get a house of her own. They found one, and each of them agreed to make every fourth payment. None of them had money to spare, but they did it anyway. My grandmother lived in that little wood-shingle house until she died.

Howard Thurman grew up in Daytona Beach, Fla., when there was no education for black children beyond seventh grade. His family scraped together the money to send him to high school in Jacksonville, but after he had bought the train ticket, he was told he had to pay extra for his baggage. He didn’t have the money, so he sat down and cried. A black man in overalls figured out what was happening and paid the charges. Thurman never knew his name. He boarded the train and went on to become a Baptist minister, a college professor and chaplain, co-founder of the first fully integrated, multicultural church in the U.S. and one of the most influential Americans of any race in the 20th century. He dedicated his autobiography to the stranger in the Daytona train station who “restored my broken dream sixty-five years ago.” Am I to believe that Thurman’s family and the stranger in the station were “helping themselves first”?

We can never secure our future with money alone. Saving is good, but few of us will ever have enough money to guarantee even the financial part of our future. We have to depend upon each other. Human beings are an interdependent species. We launch the young who take care of us when we can’t do it for ourselves.

“Childhood” has become longer because of the need for college and graduate school. Old age has become longer as well.  It is hard for the people in the middle to manage it all, but refusing provide their children an education while saving for retirement is a pattern unknown in history until now. How would history be different if the man in the train station had handed the weeping Thurman a hanky and said, “I’d love to help you, but I’m saving for my retirement.”? For the record, I am saving for my retirement, but I know very well that my real security lies with people who love me and a society that understands collective responsibility. While I can do it, I am obligated to help the young and the old. 

Patricia Hunt, of Staunton, is a chaplain at Mary Baldwin College.