A Man’s Journey to Simple Abundance by SARAH BAN BREATHNACH

Author:SARAH BAN BREATHNACH
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: SCRIBNER
Published: 2000-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Like Nelson Aldrich, I grew up in a family of big spenders. However, my parents didn’t have a family fortune to squander, only Dad’s weekly paycheck. But on some unconscious level, I knew that even if I wasn’t “to the manner born,” or manor, then at least I’d be living in one someday. (Those were the days, however, when middle-class young ladies believed the only route to the Big House was by “marrying well.” But that, as they say, is another essay for another book.)

Although my parents didn’t have any money, they did possess a wealth of what I now recognize as priceless: abundant consciousness. They were generous, taught four little children good manners at great restaurants every Sunday, entertained lavishly, and shared their good fortune with everyone who crossed their paths. My father was the biggest tipper since Diamond Jim Brady; I thought all the waiters and porters fussed over him and us because Dad was such a big shot (and in their/our eyes, he sure was). My mother doubled every recipe she ever made because someone down the street or in the parish “might need it” (and they always did). I don’t think I even realized we didn’t have any “real” money until I was a freshman in a private Catholic high school and started to hear the word debutante. When I asked my parents when was I going to have my coming-out party, they laughed and told me, I’d already made my debut—on the day I was born. And it was a great party.

But the downside of all this largesse was that my parents were so carefree with money that they never saved a dime. So when the time came for my hardworking father to retire, there wasn’t a nest egg; he continued working in a series of ever-diminishing menial jobs until the bitter end. After he died, my mother lived the next five years of her life riddled with fear, burdened with debt and guilt because she relied on the slender checks her children (who were all struggling on their own) sent every month to supplement her Social Security. After her funeral, when I was going through her papers, I discovered a slim red ledger in which she kept track of her accounts. The pain evidenced in the penciled figures and erasures still haunts me. It’s one of life’s ironies that although neither of my parents lived to bask in the ease of my financial success, the small insurance policy premium that my mother paid each month with her widow’s mite (before even heat, light, and food bills) eventually blessed me with one of the biggest financial miracles of my life: the $1,250 with which I started the Simple Abundance Charitable Fund the summer before Simple Abundance was published. By then I was a student of the spiritual laws of money and tithing my way to financial serenity.

Coming from a family of spenders, it was shocking (but not too surprising) when I married into a family of savers.

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