Be Smart, Save Money

As I come ever closer to immortality, now rounding the bases at age 80, I try to think what I have learned in my life.

By that I mean, what is super important.

Of course, a loving spouse is vital.

So is health.

But as I look at the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, and some of those are hurtling toward me right now, I try to think of what is a superpower that an ordinary citizen can get without an extremely lucky break.

That is simply money.

With money, you can get a decent house, a decent suit of clothes, a better-than decent love interest, a far better armor against the crazy, vicious people who turn up in modern life.

With money you can get a halfway decent doctor.

With money people will show you respect.

With money you will feel better about yourself when you wake up terrified in the middle of the night.

I have seen this in the lives of friends and relatives.

I have seen it in my own life.

There have been years in my life when I earned a good wage.

There have been years when I had a windfall from an investment.

Those were good times.

I slept better.

My blood pressure was better.

I got along better with my wife and friends.

Then there have been bad years when the money stopped coming in and the bills and my spending continued at a pace better suited to the good years.

 For me, here in Los Angeles, there is little consistency or predictability.

When I came out here from the East, I had powerful friends in Hollywood.

I had been a columnist for The Wall Street Journal.

I had written favorably — sometimes extremely favorably — about two writers here, Joan Didion, and John Gregory Dunne, her husband.

They were happy about it and as a return, introduced me to their literary agents, Ev Ziegler and George Diskant.

In turn, the agents sent me to studio bigwigs who frequently bought my movie ideas just on a 15-minute pitch.

But those agents were not immortal.

I moved to a new agency founded by starmaker Michael Ovitz.

It was incredibly good for me, and then it decided I was too insignificant.

That started a long downward spiral from agency to agency.

That was like the summary from Gibbon about the Caesars that came later in the Roman Empire after Augustus: The current emperor was so bad that the Romans rejoiced when he died.

Then the successor was so bad that they wished they had the previous one back.

Then I had a legal job for a hugely successful law firm.

It was incredibly hard work.

But it was interesting and paid well.

Then that came to an end as the top dogs in the firm ran into legal problems of their own. I could go on and on, but the net of it is that I could not count on money pouring in as I once could.

That meant I had to save, and save smart.

I did that, but I also spent foolishly.

The result was that I was always concerned about money.

Not good.

But I finally was able to get some footing by my real property investments.

I also had learned about financial fraud, and I was a small-scale "star" such that I was hired to travel around this great country and talk about investing.

My advice turned out well, and I made an excellent wage on my speeches.

Then my health collapsed such that while my condition was far from terminal, I could not travel. So that spigot was shut. But I had by then acquired enough in the way of assets that by selling some of them, I could feed and house my wife (a goddess).

Her health is not good, so the wage she once made as a high-level Hollywood lawyer also vanished. Enough of self-referential talk.

The end of it is that saving — in many ways — is life or death in this world. Go for it.

You will be a happier human being if you have money, and saving is the way to make it happen even unto old age. 

Ben Stein is a writer, an actor, and a lawyer who served as a speechwriter in the Nixon administration as the Watergate scandal unfolded. He began his unlikely road to stardom when director John Hughes hired him as the numbingly dull economics teacher in the urban comedy, "Ferris Bueller's Day Off." His latest book is, "The Peacemaker Nixon: The Man, President, and My Friend." Read more more reports from Ben Stein — Click Here Now.

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