Dear LPG

Do you remember when we all had to wait for so many things? I remember that saying, ‘Good things come to those who wait,’ which meant so much more when the generation that I belong to was young.

I think that more people save for things that are now so accessible that they get them and have used them long before they even start paying for them. During the best part of the last century, for many people, the only thing that anyone ever thought of ‘buying now and paying later’ for was their home. I remember moving into my first home with tiny furniture and nothing new. Everything we had was either lent or given to us by family members. It was ages before we managed to replace all those old things with new ones, and achieving that was gradual. I wonder how many other readers from that era remember putting a deposit on the items we needed and paying for them weekly while the shop we bought them from stored them for us until they were fully paid for. I think we valued those things more simply because they were ours when they arrived in our homes.  

Then came those postal shopping catalogues, the hire purchase age, the buy now and pay later craze and the introduction of the credit card, which all made having the things you wanted at home before you owned them so much easier.  

I think that, when it all started, more people who used these payment methods focussed on the more essential items that they needed to replace, like kitchen essentials and those basic furniture items, but the line demarking the difference between what is a necessity and what is a luxury has been blurring more and more over the years. 

I am sure mine is not the only mother who regularly quotes me a little bit of the bible that perhaps more of us need to remind our children and grandchildren of in this day and age. 

Proverbs chapter 22, verses 6 -7, is where the words come from. 

6. Start children off on the way they should go,
     and even when they are old, they will not turn from it.

 
7. The rich rule over the poor,
     and the borrower is a slave to the lender.

 ...a classic principle many oldies still live by regardless of where we learned it.   

I think that however you dress these paying ideas up, the only thing that any of them manage to achieve is getting people into debt. Our age group are more likely to be aware of the common sense in the words of verse 7, while we are missing the point of verse 6.  

We all know which of our children would value a minor correction in this area. Even though it is a little late to ‘start them off on the way they should go’ financially when they are as old as most of us are by now, perhaps it is a principle that we need to remind our and their children of a little more often when the opportunity arises. 

PB, Sydenham  

PB, shares something she found on the subject to help you with your explanations perhaps….

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