It’s All about the Benjamins (Franklin) in Boston (25 Images)
~ Wednesday, October 5, 2022 Blog Post ~
I want to share my thoughts about Benjamin Franklin, the American statesman who dispensed plenty of useful insights regarding wealth and money.
I want to note here that Benjamin Franklin once spoke, “A penny saved is a penny earned,” which I utilized as the title of one of the many personal finance articles I wrote.
The polymath Benjamin Franklin who espoused prudence and frugality when it came to investing and saving money did not actually remark those words. His exact statement was:
“A Penny sav’d is Twopence clear, a Pin a day is a Groat a Year. Save and have. Every little makes a mickle.” ~ Benjamin Franklin
Benjamin Franklin’s precise statement above was chronicled in “Poor Richard’s Almanack,” which was transformed into the shorthand I mentioned above. I gathered this fact from the educational reference, “Thrift and Thriving in America: Capitalism and Moral Order from the Puritans to the Present.”
This informative reference material details the American history of frugality from the Puritan Age to the Contemporary era.
Benjamin Franklin was born in Boston, Massachusetts in the 1700s. This American frugality theoretician famously remarked that “An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.”
Furthermore, Benjamin Franklin’s face is what we commonly find in the US$100-banknote today and this fact has led to the name “Benjamin” becoming synonymous to money.
Anyway, I want to share some of my images in Benjamin Franklin’s birthplace — Boston, Massachusetts — and some of my Instagram images relating to this 18th-century personal finance guru.
Moreover, I recommend reading the Instagram captions I wrote in the Benjamin Franklin-related images I uploaded below and visiting my official Instagram account with the handle @princesssheenaexcelsior, although it is now dormant. I must say my social media account is educational, witty, funny, entertaining, and informative — money-wise !
By the way, I want to include some information regarding Benjamin Franklin’s “The Way to Wealth” and this famous American statesman’s educational insights from this online article titled, “Benjamin Franklin’s “The Way to Wealth”: Documenting Its Dissemination through Bibliographical Work” by retired Harvard University Library curator Kenneth E. Carpenter.
This writer said: “Benjamin Franklin’s “The Way to Wealth” was first published as the untitled preface to Poor Richard’s Almanack for the year 1758.
It has hitherto not been known that “The Way to Wealth” deserves to take its place, along with the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, as one of the three foremost American texts of the eighteenth century.
However, recent bibliographical work — to a considerable extent based on digitization — shows how profoundly it has shaped not only Americans, but also others around the world.
About 1,200 appearances have been found in 25 languages up to 1850. In the United States, it appeared more than 300 times, about 40 times in newspapers, and the numbers will grow in future decades, as digitization progresses.
“The Way to Wealth” was not really about wealth as we think of it today. Its message was about how to accumulate enough to have material security, personal independence, and social respectability.
The means to do so were basically hard work and frugality. Franklin’s text, largely consisting of maxims of Poor Richard within the framework of a simple story, was about how to get along in this world.
It has been termed the source of the American dream, because Franklin, through this text and the example of his own life, showed that if you lived by Poor Richard’s maxims, you would get ahead.
Success was in your own hands. Europeans believed “The Way to Wealth” had shaped the character of the American people more so than any other printed work.”
I must say I feel enlightened by Mr. Carpenter’s explanation regarding Benjamin Franklin’s educative personal finance and wealth-related viewpoints, many of which are still relevant today.
References:
https://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/culture-magazines/carpenter-kenneth-edward
https://www.readex.com/readex-report/author/kenneth-e-carpenter
