Perhaps the biggest regret of writing my personal finance book was not having the opportunity to interview all of my grandparents to discover what they had learned about money over the course of their lives. However, I am fortunate to have one sage grandparent still with me who welcomed the below conversation to be documented:
Ruby Wilkerson is my maternal grandmother. She was born in Birmingham, Alabama, and moved to Winter Haven, Florida, at age 5. Grandma is now 93 and lives alone in a community for seniors 55 and older in Winter Haven. In 1946 she married my grandfather, Floyd Wilkerson. They were both 19 on their wedding day and were married for nearly 55 years when my grandpa died of a heart attack in 2002. He was 74. Before he passed, Grandpa retired from Winn-Dixie (supermarket chain) after serving in various management roles for 36 years. In the Q&A that follows, all the “he” references made by my grandmother are regarding her late husband (my grandfather) and the “we” references are speaking of the both of them (Floyd and Ruby).
How do you define money?
Money is something that you need to pay your bills and to get life’s necessities. That’s what money is to me—something you need to live on.
Fifty cents a week don’t go very far.
Grandma Ruby
How has your view of money changed from your childhood to adulthood?
My childhood we were very poor. When I was a teenager, my parents began giving me a small allowance of about 50 cents a week. I started working when I was almost 16 at the dime store and began to have my own money that I could do whatever I wanted to with. I used it to buy clothes and go to the dentist. I had never been to the dentist growing up because we couldn’t afford it. When I first started working at the phone company, I started going to the doctor. I had never gone to the doctor before either because we couldn’t afford it growing up. I never went to the doctor or dentist during my childhood.
Money was something we didn’t have much of and you had to use it for basic needs. I bought my first good winter coat when I started to work and paid whatever bills I had—all my school expenses, my class ring, and graduation costs. My daddy didn’t make much money at his job and my mother didn’t work. I wanted to work to have my own money because I wasn’t getting much at home. Fifty cents a week don’t go very far.
How did your views of money change after getting married at age 19?
I don’t know that it changed much. We were both very conservative. We didn’t buy things we could do without and part of the time during the beginning of our marriage he didn’t have a good job. Floyd had a seasonal job at a packing house in the summer and I was working at the telephone company. So, I made most of the money, but we had to use it for the basics—rent and groceries. We didn’t even have a car until we had been married for two or three years. He didn’t even know how to drive until he bought a car. We lived close to town and walked everywhere we went. Floyd bought a bicycle to deliver telegrams. Everything was within six blocks. He had to walk to his job, too [downtown Winter Haven].
When we bought our first car, we made payments on it. A few years later, I had two kids by then and he needed a better car. We sat down with pen and paper and figured out if we could afford the payment. We could not, but we bought it anyway. We did afford the payment, but it made us tight on other things.
Money was very scarce. We stretched it as far as we could. We really watched our pennies. Floyd was working at a grocery store [Winn-Dixie], so I let him buy the groceries because I had no way to get there. He was not supposed to buy the best brands. He was supposed to buy the cheapest brands to stretch the money.
Sometimes I didn’t have any money. I remember one time I robbed my son Jerry’s piggy bank to go buy a gallon of kerosene to light a heater to keep us warm.
What is your view on debt?
Some people get into debt with credit cards because they just buy anything they want. A relative of mine died deeply in debt. After she passed, we helped her family have a garage sale and she still had things that were brand new—like shoes and clothes. We saw so much money wasted going and coming out of that garage sale. Everything we were selling she could’ve took back to the store. She just bought anything she wanted and did it on credit.
Another relative went on trips and put everything on a card. He went out west and bought an RV and always flew the whole family out there. One time they went to Hawaii and put everything on a credit card. So, when he died they owed a lot. His widow was unable to pay it because she doesn’t have the means. Since he died, she’s got no income except social security and she doesn’t get much and had to do a reverse mortgage on her house. But they were having fun.
In 1959, we built our first house in Sebring, Florida. It cost $12,000 and we borrowed the money from the bank. We bought some furniture and a new car and paid cash for all that. Back then, I think a new car cost about $3,000.
The only debt we got into was for what we thought we could afford the monthly payments on. I don’t even think they had credit cards back then. I wasn’t even driving. We only had one car. I didn’t start driving until I was in my early 30s. I never had an opportunity to drive until then.
When did you start using credit cards?
I can’t remember having any credit cards when they first came out. I remember our first credit card was a Discover Card. We had to get a different one when we traveled to Hawaii because they wouldn’t take Discover to travel from one island to the next. So, we had two cards for a while, but I don’t ever remember using them. We just needed them when we planned our travel with travel agencies.
What about living off a budget?
I don’t think we exactly lived on a budget. But we were both thrifty and worked together to only buy what we needed. By the time we got to Haines City [Florida], Floyd was a market manager. I remember sometimes when I’d buy things, I’d say, “Is it OK to do so and so?” He’d say, “Your name is on the checkbook. You know how much money we’ve got.” He let me make decisions on stuff and we paid our bills and didn’t splurge much. Every summer we took a vacation but didn’t go to any place real expensive. People wondered how we took vacations. He got paid for two weeks for being off, so we used that salary money to take vacations.
We lived in the same house for 29 years and we were paying $100 a month on the mortgage at the time we moved. That house cost $13,000.
Saving money. Why is that important?
They used to have these Christmas clubs at the bank and you could put money aside during the year, so we would have all this extra money at Christmas that we could spend. It was some kind of savings account just for Christmas. We couldn’t take it out of our weekly salary because we didn’t have much money, but the bank would promote a Christmas club account to help you save for Christmas. We always had a little money for Christmas because of that Christmas club.
I think saving is important. I know that by buying stocks, Floyd was building up money for us. This was a way of saving for us.
Discuss how you [and grandpa] began investing in stocks.
I don’t remember exactly saving, but after we moved to Haines City, Floyd started getting into the stock business. The way he bought stock was he borrowed money from the bank and bought the stock and when he started getting dividends he used the dividends to pay the bank back. So it wasn’t costing us anything out of our everyday living money until he got the stock paid off. Winn-Dixie had their own stock that he started investing in. Mostly he bought Winn-Dixie and, of course, it was a big mistake in keeping it all when they went bankrupt.
He bought other stocks like Checkers, Coke, Walmart, but he wouldn’t diversify like he should have. At one point, Winn-Dixie was about $30 a share and he had about 1,300 shares. So we had quite a bit of money tied up with them. Floyd never even dreamed they could go bankrupt. He said, “There’d always be grocery stores because people have to eat.” He always felt that it was the safest thing in the world—that’s why he wouldn’t invest in others. He should’ve sold some before he died. After he died I didn’t know that much about it. I watched it and it [share price] kept going down, but I hoped it would come back up. I called a guy at the bank that handles things for me and asked if I should sell some of this stock and he said, “I think you ought to sell at least half of it.” So I sold half of my 1,300 shares and got about $30,000 out of it. It had been worth around $250,000, so we lost an awful lot of money. Then it crashed so we lost the rest of it. It was sickening.
We did do a lot of things with the [stock dividend] money while we were getting it. We went to Hawaii, traveled to California, went on a cruise, and bought a house for $72,000. We paid half of it down and when we sold our other house, we paid off the rest. All those trips and several cars we bought were all paid in cash using that stock money. I still have a little money left that I accumulated from selling my last house.
Floyd was also putting money in an IRA. It started out with about $11,000 and it’s worth $54,000 now.
What money lessons do you think are most important to teach kids?
I’ve got 11 grandkids and 10 great grandkids. They need to prepare for the future because someday they are going to get to the point where they can’t work. You need some savings. I think it’s awful to get yourself into debt with credit cards. I’d think a long time before I took on any student loan debt because it could take a lifetime to pay back. I’d just do my schooling a little bit at a time. My son, Jerry, took eight years to complete his final two years of college because he went to class on Saturdays.
What’s your story?
If you have an interesting money story you’d like to share with the potential of it being a blog feature like this one, email me at jason@yourmarginmatters.com.
For more on my financial journey and thoughts from other unique individuals, check out my book Margin Matters: How to Live on a Simple Budget & Crush Debt Forever.