Save it for a Rainy Day

As I was driving to work today, the Dos XXs commercial was on. I couldn’t find the exact commercial, but it was along these lines.

One of the last lines was, ” he never saves anything for a rainy day.”  Which made me think about if I wanted to be a saver for rainy days, or a live life to the moment type of person. I also wondered, where the saying came from. After a bit of googling I cam across:

Save for a rainy day – to keep something (usually money) until one really needs it.  Formerly most jobs, such as farm jobs, were dependent on the weather. Since they could not be carried out in rainy weather, no money was earned then.

As this saying has been around from before 1850, it was a bit of an old one and harder to find.  I found it and other sayings here.

But I digress. My point, saving for a rainy day, should we? Or should we enjoy life now.  I am a full believer in being prepared, in fact be prepared for a blog post on my preparation for disasters, etc.  Monkeybot has been so kind to  send me items for my personal preparedness. But the question that was weighing on my mind this morning, was am I working now like I was a farmer?  –waking up at  5am and going to bed when the sun is down, trying to squeeze as much work/savings as I can out of each day, with the belief that when the rainy day comes I’ll have both time and money to keep me safe.  With that thought on my mind, I then ran across (thanks twitter) Met Life’s Study on how we are saving money and preparing for rainy days.

Couple of highlights for you:

50% of Americans say they are only  one month — or only two paychecks — or less away from not being able to meet their financial obligations if they were to lose their job, and more than half of these, a startling 28% of the total respondents, couldn’t survive financially for more than two weeks.

I thought the statistic on eating out was interesting, especially as it concerns Generation Y:

66% are eating out less often. That figure rises to 71% among GenXers.

We were eating out a lot, because I was working too much and too tired to cook by the time I got home.  I’ve been trying to lose weight, so have been making an effort to cook more home low-fat meals, so I guess I fall into that statistic, but for other reasons.

As for savings, we have a bit more saved than most, which makes me ask again, am I saving EVERYTHING for a rainy day, and not living my life? I am thinking yes, as if I was doing something fun, then I’d be blogging about that, and not old idioms, random surveys by Met Life, and my pathetic work life!

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Prudish much?

So as I walked from Macy today towards the car the conversation went something like this:

He: Wow that was the worst customer service, and Men’s Wearhouse wasn’t any better, probably worse.

Me: Mental note to yelp this. Yeah I know it’s like good customer service has gone out the window.

He: It’s the Y Generation.  The new Generations are so irresponsible, and self absorbed. They’re all about them and their needs, and feel completely entitled.

And that is when it hit me.  I am old, and not just old. Old and uncool, and probably like some shriveled up old granny telling you about kids in her day. I was glad to read however that it’s not my fault that my husband an I are so stodgy and old. My best friend and I have had this conversation many a time as well, and we always just thought it was the Japanese parent who raised us to be a bit more um… conservative than the average American. But it turns out it’s our generation.  Well it’s not our generation’s fault, it’s the dumb F-ups before us. And yes I can say F-ups, because that’s what they were. Seriously key-parties, and AIDS spread worldwide. Half of Africa is dying because you guys couldn’t keep it in your pants responsibly. I had to watch click through videos in Health class on what some poor schmo’s schlong would look like if it had one of the myriad of STDs that were running around rampant. Like I wanted to see some random guys schlong to begin with, yet alone one infected with Gonorrhea!

But then I ran across Generation X goes slack on sex. Ok, so I’m Mormon, so naturally I’m already a bit more on the conservative side than most of Generation X.  But still!  I think the person writing the article was insinuating we need to loosen up. As our parents (and I’ve already pointed out what boneheads they were) and the Generations below us are a lot more “free.”  Well if “free” means and entire Generation of Paris Hilton’s, may I die now?  And if “free” means another virus even worse than AIDS (now that we’ve got that one under somewhat control) then I guess we deserve whatever comes.  What is wrong with a generation that actually values relationships and families?  See here to see the divorce rate increase while we were young. Ya good job mom’s and dad’s of America. We were the latch-key generation, and now studies are surprisingly finding power-women from top-tier schools are deciding to be stay at home moms.  And why is this so bad? We are smart women, who know that we would rather raise our children our way, where we have influence over them, than leave them to some pre-school teacher (who doesn’t have nearly the education or experience we have) or some high school teacher (who could possibly molest them). We have gone through divorces and seen what it does to us.  We value relationships, and I hope that our children will be better for it.