"Money is a poor man's credit card." -- Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980)
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Nowadays, not so much. It was true enough when the great scholar said it in 1971 -- a period when credit was still reserved for the upper crust. Then the boomers came of age and suddenly cash was so yesterday.
It's instructive that economists coined the term "disposable income" in the wealthy era right after the Second World War. Those of us who grew up then disposed of it, all right, until there was nothing left in the till. But that didn't stop us, no sir.
Sure, we disdained material goods in the 1960s. Yet we were the first cohort in history to turn legal tender into plastic magic designed to tide us over when the real stuff ran dry. Today, there are two credit cards for every Canadian adult, the majority issued to those between the ages of 45 and 65. One-third of us carry a substantial balance from month to month.
Certainly, as part of the cohort myself, I came to believe borrowing was my birthright. For years, I've been producing that platinum card on cue and dining out on it at elegant little eateries that reinforced my sense of entitlement. Buy now, pay later. "Later" was deliciously vague.
The Mad Men who traffic in emotions have enabled me, of course. From the time we were a teeming tribe of teeny-boppers who found themselves with vast amounts of fun money to spend, savvy marketers have tapped into our yearning for more and better. They told us the world owed us a living and they've been selling us a bigger, brasher, bolder bill of goods ever since.
Shiny cars that guzzle bucks and burp out poisons. Sprawling 3,000-square-foot homes equipped with every questionable gadget and gizmo a whiz-bang Silicon Valley engineer can dream up. One thousand thread-count Egyptian cotton sheets. And many of us bought into it all, on our generation's version of the instalment plan.
Oops. As recent events have made painfully clear, we owe the world our living -- and many of us will never earn enough to make good on the debt. It turns out that behind the curtain, the Wizard of Oz has been pulling the economic levers, producing all kinds of empty special effects.
Money no longer seems tethered to gold or other tangible goods. It's an ethereal web of digits and bytes cobbled together to form derivatives, hedge funds and other mysteries we can't really fathom. It operates on the if-all-goes-well standard -- and all is not going well.
The rubber is hitting the road and the gas gauge is dangerously low. Too many of us are left to pray that we'll meet the minimum payment required when the bills come due. We pray that the job will last. We pray the equity in our house will stop evaporating, that a black hole won't swallow our retirement funds. We pray. We pray. We pray.
The good news is that our prayers have already been heard: They just haven't been answered in the way we've come to expect. Dr. Spock might have encouraged our parents to indulge our every whim, but the gods are having none of it. They've given us the financial spanking of our lives. They've sent us to our rooms without our credit cards and told us we can't come out until we learn the value of an old-fashioned loonie.
It's a hard lesson.
"Thrift comes too late," wrote the Roman Lucius Seneca, who preceded our demographic by some two millennia, "when you find it at the bottom of your purse." He had a point. But maybe there's time to redeem ourselves (and our coupons) yet.
In typical boomer manner, some of us are taking the punishment and turning it into a fashion statement. The evidence is out there. The local Craigslist is awash in barter. ("I need a haircut," reads one entry. "What do you need?") We're visiting secondhand stores in record numbers these days -- and not because we're dropping off last season's designer duds. We're stopping to calculate prices in the supermarket. All of a sudden, frugality is us.
If anyone can make thrift the new black, it's the Woodstock generation.
