Money troubles are not a modern problem. Almost forty years ago in Bluffton, Indiana, Betty and Dave Jacobs allowed their money struggles to become the focus of an article in a national magazine.
Today millions of families still suffer from the exact same money issues and troubles. They suffer needlessly.
It is obvious from reading this article, people today make the same mistakes when trying to become financially successful. Today the lack of motivation many people have to conquer their financial problems is the only thing holding them back from a life of plenty. Time after time we have witnessed people sabotage their own financial success by trying to get out of debt without help.
Imagine how much better Dave and Betty's lives could have been if they had asked for help.
Dave loves Betty but oh, that check!
Dave and Betty Jacobs don't really love money more than each other, but the very sight of it sets their hearts athump. They, like millions of other Americans, are heavily in hock to their dreams for everything from a car to a picnic patio, and money is the persistent mosquito at the picnic.
They make money, all right, but they have to connive even against themselves to stretch. The check they're kissing at left is money Dave hid from himself, a $331 U.S. government income tax rebate. He "earned" it by not taking a standard deduction for his second child in giving withholding-tax information to his employer, the Franklin Electric Co., Inc., of Bluffton, Ind. So now he has it-and he can indeed use it.
Time was, especially in places like Bluffton, when young couples scrimped and saved and most of all waited to buy what the wanted. That used to be "The American Way." Today the way has changed. Young couples still scrimp and save, but they do not wait. They borrow, living on credit in a fashion that mortgages them far beyond the horizon, to get what they want now.
Dave and Betty Jacobs and Bluffton, Ind., whose monetary pleasures and perils are explored on following pages, are typical of Americans in the 1960s. They may be wrong in gambling so heavily on the future, or they may be as right as their fore-fathers who gambled on crossing the Alleghenies.
