Rensselaer Republican, Volume 17, Number 7, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 23 October 1884 — Five Cents a Day. [ARTICLE]

Five Cents a Day.

The cumulative power of money is a fact very generally appreciated. There are few men living at the age of seven-ty-five, hanging on to existence by some slender employment, or pensioners, it may be, on the bounty of kindred or friends, but might, by exercising the smallest particle of thrift, rigidly adhered to in the set aside a respectable sum which would materially help, them to maintain their independence in their old age. take the small sum of five cents, which we daily pay to have our boots blackened, to ride in a car the distance we are able to walk, or to procure a bad cigar we are better without, and see what its value is in the course of years. We will suppose a boy of fifteen, by blacking his own boots, or saving his cherished cigarette, puts by five cents a day; ini one year he saves $18.25, which being banked bears interest at the rate of five per cent, per annum, compounded of bi-yearly. On this basis, when our thrifty youth reaches the age of' sixty-five,*having set his five cents per day "religiously aside during fifty years, the result is surprising. He has accumulated no less a sum than $3,983.18. A scruntiny of the progress of this result is interesting. At the age of thirty our hero had $395; at forty, $878; at fifty, $1,667 ;at sixty, $2,862. After fifteen years saving, his annual interest more than equals his original principal, in*twenty-five years it is more than double; in thirty five years it is four times as much; in forty-five years it is eight times as much, and the last year’s interest is SB6, or ten and a half times as much as the annual amount he put’s by. The actual cash amount saved in fifty years is $932.50, the difference between that and the grand total of $3,803.18—viz., 970.68, is accumulated interest. ,What a magnificent premium for the minimum of thrift that can be well represented in figures.—Anon.