Revive old-school money habits to thrive in modern times
As flying drones become a permanent fixture in the night sky, it's easy to romanticize simpler times - especially for those living paycheck to paycheck while wondering how their parents and grandparents started with so little but got so far.
Mythologizing the past can be counterproductive, but necessity forced bygone generations to live by basic, bedrock financial principles that modern consumer culture has diluted - but not erased.
Reviving these tried-and-true money habits from the past can help you thrive in the future.
Living below your means is one of the most old-school - and most certain to increase wealth - money habits there are. Generations of Americans got ahead by going without, and Walmart founder Sam Walton, born in 1918, embodied that spirit.
Waste not, want not: Frugality is abstaining from things you want. Its counterpart is not wasting what you have - particularly something as primary as the food that so many yesteryear people struggled to secure from one meal to the next.
In 2025, an Environmental Protection Agency report found that modern Americans throw away one-third of the food they buy, with the average consumer wasting $728 per year on uneaten groceries. That's $2,913 for a family of four, or $56 a week, every week.
Keep it simple: Your institutional-grade growth portfolio packed with artificial intelligence (AI) stocks, cryptocurrencies and alternative investments might be exotic and exciting, but it's loaded with so much risk that it's just this side of a get-rich-quick scheme.
Low-cost, passively managed S&P 500 exchange-traded funds (ETFs) aren't nearly as sexy, but the United States large-cap market has spent the last century delivering 10% annualized returns, on average, as trends, fads and speculative bubbles came and went in the background.
Never borrow to buy what you can't afford: While credit cards can provide valuable rewards, the people who earn the benefits are the ones who adopt their grandparents' cash-based mentalities - if you don't have the money to cover the purchase, then you can't afford to buy it.