Money Secrets of the Amish

Lorilee Craker

• Publisher: Thomas Nelson
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781595554017
• Topic: Persönliche Entwicklung
• Subtopic: Private Finanzen

Are you ready to take control of your finances, no matter where the market goes? Join Lorilee Craker as she shares the time-tested Amish secrets to enjoying true abundance on a practical budget.

When writer Lorilee Craker learned that Amish communities are thriving (not just surviving) during periods of economic downturn, she decided she had to find out why. Along the way, she found a treasure trove of tried-and-true financial habits the Amish have employed for generations that will forever change how you think about money.

In Money Secrets of the Amish, Craker gives you the tools you need to:

• Use it up, wear it out, make do, or do without
• Repurpose, recycle, and reuse what you already have
• Find the value in delayed gratification and self-control

Praise for Money Secrets of the Amish:

" Money Secrets of the Amish is a practical, doable guide, and it's such fun to read. Lorilee's voice is as engaging and lively as ever, and the wisdom she shares from the Amish community is both inspiring and instructive. I just finished the last page, and my mind is buzzing with all sorts of ways to waste less, want less, and spend less."

--Shauna Niequist, bestselling author of I Guess I Haven't Learned that Yet and Present Over Perfect

1

UPSIDE DOWN

Bishop Eli King is a formidable character.

Renowned in Lancaster County as one of the most conservative, by-the-book bishops in the area, Bishop Eli gives off the air of someone who rules a small dictatorship, and not just sixty or so families in his two districts.

For one, he looks just like Abraham Lincoln with his canny-looking, deep-set eyes, prominent chin, and antique beard and clothes. Abe Lincoln with a bowl cut, that is. Rumor has it that Eli will put the Bann (excommunication) on you for putting one toe over the Ordnung, the written and unwritten rules of the Amish.

I’m a little scared of him already, and we’ve only just begun our chat. It doesn’t help that I’m perched delicately on the rim of a bathtub, in the middle of a construction site where Eli works.

The only way he would agree to meet with me is if I questioned him during his lunch hour, as he didn’t want to take time away from his employer. Coated with carpentry dust, munching an egg salad sandwich, he accepted my thanks for making time during his lunch break. “Being taught to love work makes all the difference,” he said, taking another bite. “There’s not much spare time when the budget is tight.”

The truth is, the budget has been tight for Eli and his People. Even though overall the Amish have hunkered down and weathered the economic hailstorm of the past couple of years much better than the rest of us, they haven’t been completely insulated.

According to Amish expert Erik Wesner, author of Success Made Simple: An Inside Look at Why Amish Businesses Thrive, the People have felt the decreased demand that comes in a downturn. “A decline in business can trickle down through the community and even affect those businesses that are strictly ‘Amish-oriented,’” he said. “So for example, instead of buying a new buggy for your soon-to-be-sixteen-year-old son for a few thousand dollars from the local Amish carriage shop, you might be more inclined to pick one up at the auction for half that.”

Adapting to shaky financial times is something the Amish do extremely well. Instead of buying new buggies, they’ll buy used. Jake the Builder will remodel old homes instead of constructing new ones. One Plain housewife I spoke to said that when times are tight, she’ll substitute maple syrup (tapped from her own trees, of course) for sugar in her baking and cooking. Wesner tells of a sawmill owner who switched to vegetable oil—acquired free as a throwaway product from local restaurants—to substitute for diesel, amounting to a thousand-dollar monthly savings.

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“We scrape the bottom of the barrel more than most.” —Bishop Eli

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The Amish are resourceful, to be sure, but there’s much more to their money success than that.

Why have they managed to do so well, even in the midst of the recession? Eli offered some insights:

“We scrape the bottom of the barrel more than most,” Bishop Eli told me, with an Amishman’s gift for understatement, and a rather un-Amish, zealous grin.

“When I grew up,” he continued, “my parents didn’t have more than the necessities. We were taught that when we go away from the plate, it is empty. Today, there is so much wasted food.

“Waste not, want not,” he concluded, polishing off the last morsel of his sandwich.

On debt, he had this to say: “Ya gotta make up what you don’t have; don’t borrow it.”

On eating out: “We frown upon eating at restaurants.” (Many Amish eat out occasionally, but apparently not under Eli’s oversight.)

On the Amish work ethic: “We work with our hands so we can help the poor; the Bible says to.”

Eli expressed concern about the immoderate spending habits now creeping into Plain life and community. “Money is our biggest danger,” he said, stabbing a finger in the air. “Too much leads to foolish spending, fancy foods.”

By the time we were ready to wrap up our chat, I felt that Eli had warmed up to me, and I to him. Sure, he’s kind of extreme, but I feel that he’s a nice man, despite his severe pronouncements.

“I see you’re wearing buttons there, Eli,” I teased. “I thought buttons were verboten.”

He grinned—a wide and blazing grin—and yanked open the top part of his shirt. I nearly fell into the bathtub.

The underside of his shirt revealed Velcro inserts. “I fooled ya, didn’t I?”

The Amish, I was to learn, are full of surprises.

FOUR HUNDRED THOUSAND DOLLARS!

Amos certainly surprised me. The forty-five-year-old farmer had saved four hundred thousand dollars over the course of twenty years, while renting a farm and raising fourteen children. When I visited Amos and his wife, Fern, and their beautiful family, I looked for signs of stinginess, of a wife and children suffering somehow under the regime of a tight-fisted, straw-hatted Scrooge.

No one seems deprived; in fact, just the opposite. Amos and Fern’s adorable children have a calmness and peace that I find striking and appealing. The Millers are a happy, thriving family, and Amos is a kind, loving father, who smiled fondly at his little ones as they climbed on and off his lap during our interviews. Fern told me that she’s been checking out the fliers, looking for a sale on trampolines; this summer the little Millers are going to be bouncing and flipping to their hearts’ content.

I tried every journalistic trick in the book to get Amos to impart pearls of wisdom, but it finally came down to this: “As far as our ‘money secrets,’ these are values handed down for generations—we can’t take credit,” he said.

And he’s partly right. Thrift, common sense, wise money management, delayed gratification, etc., are taught from the time wee Moses and Mary are knee-high to a grasshopper. Amos can’t boast about being thrifty any more than a child born into an Amish home could brag about knowing how to speak Pennsylvania Dutch. Money lessons are learned from the start of life.

Though he won’t accept credit, Amos is definitely doing something right, and has been doing it—with Fern’s help— for the last two decades.

Basically, Amos doesn’t really know what he’s done that’s so remarkable. (The Plain humility is one more way the Amish are radically countercultural.)

“I’ve been around them a long time,” said Banker Bill, “and the main thing that sets them apart, money-wise, is their values. They are upside down.”

Kind of like the topsy-turvy English translation of some Dietsch sentences, like: “Jakie, throw Grampop down the stairs his hat.” Or, “Ida, outten the light and make the door shut.” And one more: “Buzzy, did you come over the hill down?”

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Just which culture has things wrong side up?

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It makes you wonder, just as we get the visual of poor Grampop lying on his head at the bottom of the stairs, just which culture has things wrong side up?

When compared to our Englisher money bungles, the Amish way of wealth is a whole inverted lifestyle of thrift, self-control, carefulness, sharing, and community. It’s a curious prosperity—a rootedness, simplicity, and a step back to “quaint” money values—that goes way beyond debt-free living.

My peek at the Amish and their upside-down ways convinced me: they turn us Fancy folk on our excessive, over-leveraged heads.

So how do we get turned right side up again?

The Amish can’t teach us one golden piece of money wisdom that will help us live happy, contented lives while slowly but surely amassing gobs of cash like Amos did. On the contrary, there are about a dozen financial habits—money secrets—that we can pick up from folks like Amos (and Bishop Eli, Ephraim, Sadie, Naomi, et al.), spokes in a wheel that has been turning smoothly for centuries.

Hanging out with Amish folk such as Amos, I finally learned to pay attention to their habits and practices more than their words.

There was the old shovel, perfectly usable, with a piece of steel welded onto the handle, lying in the front flower bed (“You and I would have bought a new shovel a long time ago,” Banker Bill pointed out). “We try and repair what we can,” Amos said with a shrug.

Fern buys flour and sugar and other staples in fifty-pound bags from the Amish bulk food store, eliminating the middleman and saving scads over the years.

And as cherished as Lizzie, Eli, Katie, Sadie, and the rest are to their parents, Amos and Fern do not spoil them with a lot of extras. “We don’t buy them whatever they want,” Amos said.

When the work is done and the cows are milked, the Millers have fun together, playing badminton and making soft pretzels and homemade ice cream. The gentle tempo of their simple lifestyle seemed like soothing music to me.

Amos, you may not be willing to give yourself a pat on the back, but I give you all the credit in the world. Now all we have to do is figure out how to apply your tips (or “non-tips,” as it were) to our own lives, and we...