Not a Dime To Spare, but Lots of Regret

It's not like I didn't get sound financial advice.

My parents are children of the Great Depression who put great emphasis on building nest eggs and living within one's means. They never forgot the words to Bing Crosby's 1932 hard-knocks song "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?"

But I wasn't listening.

They'd quote Ben Franklin: "A penny saved is a penny earned." But I'd still put a dollar in a Starbucks tip jar after paying $4 for a cup of coffee.

When a TV infomercial said I could buy a flat-ab squeezer and get a fountain-of-youth drink free if I called now, I called.

No wonder I'm broke.

After taking an early retirement a couple of years ago, I invested in what I had thought were two bedrocks of American economic life: newspapers and real estate. Now, as the nation faces the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, my land deals are worth less than dirt, and my newspaper stocks are barely worth the paper they are printed on.

In the past four months, the value of my home has plummeted so low that I now owe more than it's worth. As Wall Street posted a record point loss Monday, my financial portfolio was reduced to chump change.

Brother, can you spare a trillion dollars?

My parents' financial wisdom would not have staved off the nation's economic storm, but it might have helped me hedge my bets. Suddenly, the low-yield, low-risk treasury bills that they purchased through the years look much better than, say, the once high-yielding stock in Lehman Brothers. But I'm a baby boomer, a product of the narcissistic "age of desire." Delayed gratification is anathema to me; I want quick returns. Get me a house, flip it, take the equity out. Repeat.

My financial bible was the Sharper Image catalogue, not Ben Franklin's almanac. My financial guru growing up was the hamburger-addicted Wimpy, who told Popeye time and again, "I'll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today."

It was a cool scam because there was no Tuesday in Popeye land.

My parents used say to me, "Early to bed, early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise." But in my later years, I figured out that if you stayed up late playing poker and won a big pot, then you could sleep late and still wake up feeling wealthy and wise, if not always healthy.

Now, visions of an economic depression have shattered all high-stakes poker fantasies. My parents had seen the food and unemployment lines, watched drifters riding the rails, heard the stories about people committing suicide after losing their savings in the stock market. Suddenly, that didn't seem like a quaint parable from the past anymore. And their principles of responsible living apply today as much as the days before specialty coffeehouses.

I called Larry Bailey, a friend and accountant to the stars (such as Venus and Serena Williams), for advice on how to get out of this jam.

"When I go to Africa sometimes, I'll come upon a place that has a total cash economy," he said. "You don't buy a car on credit; you save up until you can buy it outright. You don't build a house until you have the cash to pay for it. You can build it in stages, one room at a time, but you have to pay as you go. Of course, nobody wants to go back to something like that, but if our economy is going to start expanding again, we'll need to find a happier medium between using cash and relying on credit."

It hurt just listening to him. But my parents had tried to warn me. Moderation in all things, they'd say. A fool and his money are soon parted. Even the singer Prince had warned of dark days to come:

Two thousand zero zero party over,

Oops out of time

So tonight I'm gonna party like it's 1999.

Unfortunately, some of us had partied about 10 years too long. Now it is time to ante up and pay the piper.

E-mail:milloyc@washpost.com