As the calendar gallops towards Labor Day and (yikes!) my 40th wedding anniversary, I’m reminded of the joint savings account Bill and I opened together after our marriage in 1977. It was with the Brookline Savings Bank in Brookline, MA, and our starting balance was somewhere around $700. Between the two of us, that was our net worth back then.
I still have a passbook savings account with Brookline Bank and the balance is considerable higher today. And that account represents a small portion of our net worth. But I hang onto the passbook and the habit of regular savings as much today as I did four decades ago. In fact, this is the account I use to accumulate my $5s, the stash of money I put away by saving every $5 that comes back to me as change in a cash transaction. Today, the amount of money saved in $5s is close to $40,000 (after about 13 years), coincidentally as I approach 40 years of marriage.
Some of you might say, OK, no big deal. Forty years of marriage or $40,000 saved in $5 bills. But I disagree. Imagine how big my nest egg would have grown if I’d saved my $5s back then when we said. ‘I do.’ By my rough calculations, I save approximately $3,076 a year in $5s. If I multiply that by 40 years of marriage, I’d add to my wedded bliss because besides decades filled with love, mutual respect and a whole lot of wonderful memories, I’d have $123,040. Imagine the kind of anniversary trip we could take with that!
Yours in Five,
Marie
Save Money Fast With FIves 