If you watch Fox news or listen to much AM talk radio, you have probably heard of Dave Ramsey. He is a popular personal financial advisor with books, seminars and a call-in radio show. When I was working more regularly in Huntsville and had to drive somewhere around lunchtime, I would sometimes listen to his radio show because there was nothing else on. If you can get past his self-satisfied expressions of his Christian beliefs and right-wing politics, he has some reasonable advice for people who buy cars they can’t afford and run up huge credit card balances. What he tells them to do is to stop using their credit cards, pay off their debts, stop buying things they can’t afford and get onto a budget.

Fine advice, but I sometimes have to turn off the radio when he gets too deep into his personal religion and his politics, which don’t seem too … let’s say, progressive. “Christian financial advice” seems self contradictory to me. I am pretty sure there are no words attributed to Jesus in the New Testament that are favorably inclined towards wealth or the accumulation of it. The verses I can remember are things like Jesus telling the rich man to sell all he has and give the money to the poor, or how hard it is for a rich man to enter heaven, or that a man can’t serve both god and money. I never heard Dave Ramsey advise anyone to sell all their possessions and give the money to the poor. Not even close, not even once. He is far more likely to advise people to follow the habits of the rich.

But, back to the point.

One thing Ramsey likes to tell people is that if you live like no one else today, later you can live like no one else. Putting aside the weak rhetorical structure, what he is advising is that people should live frugally, eating rice and beans, saving their money and paying off their debts, so that later they can live like rich people.

I have no problem with most of that. Leah and I have no debt. We own our house and pay off our credit card in full every month. We are pretty frugal. And I like rice and beans, although I can’t convince Leah that they make a perfectly good meal, even without meat.

But I don’t like the principle behind Ramsey’s saying. Basically, it’s the old puritan principle of deferred gratification.

My work history, as shown in my Social Security earnings record, looks kind of spotty. I have spent a large percentage of my working life not working. In fact, I have a pretty solid record of quitting whatever it is I’m doing if I don’t like it. I’ve dropped out quite a few times, both from school and from work. Since about 1997 I haven’t even had a full-time job. I have worked as an independent contractor, which has allowed a work schedule more suited to my personality.

For 55 years, or at least the adult part of that, I never gave much consideration to money or what I would do for money in Dave Ramsey’s “later.” When I traveled, I usually spent the nights in the bed of my truck with the dog, and I figured I could always do that “later.”

All of this is just to point out that I am not an ant. It’s not that I have spent all my money, I just never really planned for retirement. That is, until I got married. Leah has never thought it was very funny when I suggested our retirement home should be under one of Rome’s bridges. We’ve been doing some serious work on retirement savings, so I don’t think we’re going to have to do that, but I still don’t believe in Dave Ramsey’s deferred gratification philosophy. I don’t think you should put off doing thing until later, because later may never come. Instead of “live like no one else today”, how about “gather ye rosebuds while ye may” or “carpe diem” or even “there is no time like the present”?

Or, how about one of Charles Schulz’s Snoopy sayings? Charles Schulz died almost 14 years ago, but his comic strip Peanuts has lived on. I’m glad, because I have been looking for one of the Peanuts strips, and it recently appeared in the Atlanta paper. In this strip, Charlie Brown brings Snoopy two bowls of food and tells Snoopy that he will be gone the next day, so he should save one bowl for tomorrow. Snoopy eats one bowl and returns to lie on his doghouse. He resists for a while, but is eventually overcome and leaps on the second bowl and eats it. Then he lies on the roof of his doghouse and says, “I’m glad I ate it … I would have hated myself if tomorrow had never come!”

I’m with you, Snoopy, you and the grasshopper.