The gift of saving

By Dr. Johnny Noet Ravalo
INQUIRER.net

It’s the end of the year and by now all the gifts have been opened. That also means that our billing statements will soon be in the mail as well. No matter. It’s the season of sharing and we are just as happy to go through the shopping and the wrapping to remind family and friends that they matter.

As I look at my nephews, nieces and godchildren comparing their respective “loot for the season”, I realize that I grew up in a very different, much more measured environment. I turn philosophical (it comes with the season . . .) and ask myself: what gift did I receive from my parents that had a lasting impact on me?

The answer is as corny as it is discerning: my parents invested into my future by saving.

My father’s mantra was “simple living” and he found every opportunity to recite it as if it was a pledge (he still does today). I thought it was just an excuse so we did not have to eat out or take family vacations (if we couldn’t reach a place by car, don’t count on seeing it). Dad was a disciplinarian and it was not a wise move to get the ire of an ex-military man either by being short ten centavos or “agreeing” to receive those green candies in lieu of the right amount of change.

But he also took on two teaching loads in a graduate school, carrying out this responsibility at night after his day job and giving up his Saturdays. Yes, he loved both the teaching part and the mind games of the case studies (I found my business subjects in college quite easy in part because I read cases at a young age). But I could not understand why someone who lives in Quezon City and works full-time in Makati will bother to teach in a school along Taft Avenue. It was simply “out of his way” which for dad was a major infraction on “simple living”. Eventually though, I understood the payoff: for as long as he was teaching and taking the administrative load, my grade school (and then my high school) tuition was discounted significantly.

The biggest hurdle to saving though is that it remains an abstract asset until it is actually deployed. I knew about the tuition discount as a young boy but it wasn’t something I could see or hold. Back then, saving felt more like “foregoing present-day opportunities” rather than an investment for the future.

I don’t think I understood, really understood, why my parents were so “measured” until I was accepted to graduate school abroad. Despite the school acceptance, we still had to show the embassy a bank balance. After that, the trip itself and having to start a new life in an alien environment required a sizeable treasure by itself. I was fortunate to have received an academic scholarship which settled my tuition but I became a working student by circumstance. Trying to match a $3.75-an-hour minimum wage with an $800-a-month rent in Brookline meant that I had to focus more on “working” than on the “student” part of the equation. This was no longer someone else’s saving but something I had to generate and then manage on my own.

What is the point of all these?

I am very sure that I am better off today because of the invaluable opportunity of studying in Boston at a top-ranked institution. Professionally, the academic training gave me a different perspective, if not a broader toolkit to work with. At the personal level, one does not forget the challenges of living alone in a foreign environment without the comforts of family and, more importantly, the consequences of not having savings that you can tap when you need them when the need arises.

All these gains were possible only because my parents had the uncanny ability to maintain the discipline of saving. I’m sure they heard my siblings and I whenever we grumbled at yet another facet of “simple living” but I am very thankful that they either didn’t hear very well or simply chose to lend a deaf ear.

I concede that saving is harder today simply because it is harder to manage today’s environment. Income streams are not as permanent and the cost of living depends a lot on volatile external factors.

But perhaps saving is harder because we have lost our way with this virtue. Saving is not preventing expenses to be incurred but striking instead a hard balance between income and expenses. With a few hugs from my family, we are off to our favourite eating place. It’s an added expense but it does not necessarily make us poor savers. It runs counter to my parents “simple living” rules but I think we can still be effective at saving even if we indulge ourselves every now. In fact my father likes to eat out nowadays, I suppose because he doesn’t pay the bill anymore. The point is that his “simple living” rules are actually not absolute but very much relative.

This is the nature of saving. There must be some rules but do not have to be the same for everyone to make it work. To make the discipline work, we have to be comfortable with it. And the ultimate gauge of whether we are effective in our saving is the ability to transfer purchasing power through time when and where it is most needed.

This is the gift of saving that I have been so blessed to have received. I live a different life because someone saved for me when I didn’t have the capacity to do so and instilled in me the discipline for it when I did have such a capacity.