Canadian household debt is at an all-time high, with the ratio of debt to annual household income at more than 163 per cent. Going into debt is considered the norm. It gets a lot of people into trouble.
They should listen to and learn from my neighbour, June Williams. She knows from experience the value of saving and avoiding debt.
June was 18 going on 19 when she emigrated from England to Edmonton with her parents in 1949. One of the reasons for leaving England was her parents’ disapproval of June’s growing attachment to Henry, a young man she had worked with on a Bedfordshire farm for several years. Henry was not to be dissuaded — he got his immigration paperwork done in jig time and met June in Edmonton when she arrived. They married about a year later.
They worked on Alberta farms for several years, until June’s father and Henry drove to Victoria in 1954.
“My dad says: ‘This is paradise, this is heaven — this is where we’re going to live the rest of our lives,’ ” June said.
Henry found a job and sent for June and their two young children.
“We rented a place in James Bay,” she said. “It was one room with a tiny kitchen and a woodstove.”
She managed the household finances carefully, putting spare money into a cake tin she kept under the bed.
After about a year, and imminently pregnant with her third child, June decided she wanted a house for her family, so she contacted a real estate agent and went looking.
“You really needed $2,000 [down] in those days, but I had only $1,000,” she said. “The houses you could get for $1,000 [down] were garbage.
The agent took her to a house in Fernwood owned by an elderly couple. It was what she needed, with four bedrooms and a fenced back yard.
“The guy climbed the stairs and said, ‘She’s only got $1,000 down, but can she look around?’”
The couple invited her in and she looked the house over, up and down, no small task given that she was nine months pregnant. She was able to get the house for $1,000 down — all nickels, dimes and quarters — and $65 a month.
By scrimping on household expenses and earning extra money as a seamstress, June was able to pay the 20-year loan off in eight years.
She and Henry, who died a couple of years ago, didn’t believe in going into debt as they raised their eight children. They were thrifty, but they didn’t go without.
“If you want something, you save for it,” she said. “That’s what I taught my children, and that’s what they do.”
Circumstances brought her the custody of grandson as a baby and she willingly took on the responsibility of raising him. She called him “my little pilot,” because of the ambition he had from when he was very young.
“He always wanted to be a pilot. When I walked him to and from school, I would pick up cans and bottles,” she said. “That was his pilot fund.”
He became a licensed pilot as a teenager, thousands of dollars in flight instruction paid for by June’s frugal ways. He now has a good career in aviatiaon and is a careful manager of his money.
June says debt brings misery. “If you have high debt, you can’t sleep at night,” she said.
She has taught lessons to young couples on managing household incomes, and her lessons always come with the admonition that the best way to get what you want is not to borrow, but to save for it.
It’s not a lesson a lot of people want to hear these days — we live in an age of entitlement and instant gratification. As a result, in some households, the biggest expense is servicing debt.
A lot of headaches could be avoided by following the June Williams method — it’s an old-fashioned approach, but it will never be obsolete.
