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!
