SmartyPig

My Sundays are reserved for family – and the New York Times – if I’m lucky enough for the rest of my crew to go down for naps. Yesterday, when my wife came to find me after waking up, my five year old in tow, I handed her the Business section of the paper and pointed at the front page. “Read this,” I said. The article, by Stephanie Rosenbloom, is titled, “But will it make you happy?” It is all about a populace slowly awakening to something that should be old hat: It’s time to get back to basics when it comes to finances.

Your grandparents have probably always thought that you don’t know the value of a buck. Your grandparents have always been right. They were a part of the cash-in-hand generation, paying cash for the stuff they wanted. My grandfather paid for his only house, every car and everything else he ever owned with cash. He wasn’t well-to-do by a long shot. He was an ironworker who never had a credit card. When he bought something like a new TV it was an event.

“Before credit cards and cell phones enabled consumers to have almost anything they wanted at any time, the experience of shopping was richer,” Wendy Liebmann of WSL Strategic Retail says in the story. “You saved for it, you anticipated it.” Added Rosenbloom: “In other words, waiting for something and working hard to get it made it feel more valuable and more stimulating… In fact, scholars have found that anticipation increases happiness.”

My grandfather was on to something. Although he probably would have waved his hand in dismissal or pointed at his head to indicate that it is simple common sense.

“We’re moving from a conspicuous consumption – which is ‘buy without regard’ – to a calculated consumption,” Marshal Cohen, an analyst, told Rosenbloom. What Mr. Cohen really means, however, is that we are “moving back” to it.

From coupons to cutting up credit cards to analyzing daily spending, this so-called new awareness is morphing into a movement that is actually no more complicated than the ceramic piggy bank my five year old adds change and the occasional dollar bill to. It is a concept that we’ve built our business around – this concept that my grandfather would have argued is no real concept at all: Save for the stuff you want.

Jon Gaskell, SmartyPig co-founder