By: Emma Friel
Every time I think of finance, my mom comes to mind. My mom taught me everything that I know about finance, and when it came time to take finance classes in school, she still taught me more than my teachers did. My mom and I spent many summers talking about saving and finance. She taught me how to save, where to save, when to save, who to entrust your money to, where to invest, how to read credit reports, how to balance checkbooks, how to look at investment statements, how to decipher her system for monitoring our investments and where all the passwords for the thousands of online accounts are. To this day, she hounds me on the importance of saving money, never buying anything without a coupon unless it is absolutely needed. My mom deserves all the credit for teaching me what I know about finance. Just like with teaching me how to type, a skill that I hated having to learn, I am grateful to her for teaching me about finance. I still have a lot to learn, but my foundation is solid thanks to her.
There was one question that I often asked my mom about finance that she was not able to answer. It is a question that I ask of all my teachers, whether verbally or not, and very few can answer it, the successful teachers quickly becoming my favorites. My question involves the only question word that I did not use in the paragraph above: Why? ‘Why’ questions are almost always the easiest to ask, but the hardest to answer. They are broad in meaning and often lead to different responses, answers varying from the same person in different situations. For me, I know that I will have zero interest in a topic unless I understand why I am doing it. I can learn statistics or I can learn advanced calculus, but unless I know why I am spending my time there, I will never understand what I am learning. Knowing my need for a reason, I asked my mom why it is important to save and invest. She gave me answers such as ‘To ensure you are prepared for the future’ or ‘To be able to provide for someone you love’. Those answers didn’t satisfy me; it was like saying ‘you need to learn calculus BC so you can set off a rocketship seventy years in the future’… problem is I am a musician. I do not blame my mom for not answering this question, I think she misunderstood what I was asking, and I know my school finance teachers failed to answer it too.
I did eventually find my answer, in the form of a house in Corona, Queens. The house belonged to Louis Armstrong, famous jazz trumpeter and singer, master of his craft and father of modern music. He invented using words in songs such as “baby” and “honey”: modern music would be lost without him. The one benefit would be no cringy Justin Bieber songs. For a brief history about Louis, he started as a poor boy in New Orleans with a dream and an ear. His first notes on a trumpet were in a correction school, a move made after he was arrested for firing a gun on a holiday. After that, he started working on a Mississippi steam boat, before leaving to start his own band. He was used to sacrificing and working for a living, traveling some 300 days a year and practicing even when the doctor forbade him to do so because of a heart attack. Many would say his tireless devotion to his work paid off after seeing his house in Corona. Not a cheap area by any means, his house also had a bathroom made of mirrors, a blue kitchen, and a custom King oven that says for “Mr. and Mrs. Louis Armstrong”. In his later years, he had coffers of money, a community that cared for him, and a world of adoring fans. That story alone would make a good testament to the power of savings. If only the story ended there.
What few people know about Satchmo was that his fourth wife, Lucille, actually bought that house in Corona. She was a dancer in a club that Louis often played at, and they fell in love. In an era when women were not seen as primary breadwinners, or even expected to understand how money and savings worked, a lowly dancer managed to save enough money to pay the down payment and several months of a mortgage on the house, all by herself. Louis was not paying for this house, he didn’t even know of its purchase. When I really stopped to think about it, I was quite amazed by what Lucille had done. Dancers don’t make a lot of money, yet she saved enough, obviously making sacrifices along the way, to have a place of comfort for her and Louis to come home to. She was financially independent from Louis, defying the norm to see her dream come true. How she was able to do it, I will never understand.
That day, Lucille Armstrong not only became one of my heroes, but she also answered my question of why saving is important. There are not many words I can put to the experience, but it gave saving and investing a new meaning for me. Looking back on all of my mom’s lessons, Lucilles’s sacrifice and determination gives all of them a new meaning, inspiring me to make changes in my daily life to follow in her footsteps. I now stop to question ‘Do i really need this, or can I wait until the next sale comes’ before buying something. I also started going out of my way to monitor my savings and checking accounts. Even my mom’s motivations make more sense through this new lens. I hope that one day, I can be financially independent, just like my mom and Lucille Armstrong.
