4 Old-School Money Habits That Quietly Make People Rich
With flying drones now a permanent fixture in the night sky, no one could blame people for pining for simpler times -- especially those living paycheck to paycheck while wondering how their parents and grandparents started with so little but got so far.
Mythologizing the past can be counterproductive, but necessity forced bygone generations to live by basic, bedrock financial principles that modern consumer culture has diluted -- diluted but not erased.
Revive these tried-and-true money habits from the past to thrive in the future.
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Be Frugal
Fewer money habits are more old-school -- and more certain to increase wealth -- than living below your means. Generations of Americans got ahead by going without, and Walmart founder Sam Walton, born in 1918, embodied that spirit.
In 1992, two years before Walton died, the Chicago Tribune profiled the famously frugal lifestyle of the "King of Thrift," who drove a beater pickup with missing hubcaps, dined at the Days Inn, worked in an 8-by-12-foot office cubicle and lived in a modest home in small-town Arkansas while quietly building a billion-dollar empire.
Waste Not
Frugality is abstaining from things you want. Its counterpart is not wasting what you have -- particularly something as primary as the food that so many yesteryear people struggled to secure from one meal to the next.
In 2025, an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) report found that modern Americans throw away one-third of the food they buy, with the average consumer wasting $728 per year on uneaten groceries. That's $2,913 for a family of four, or $56 a week, every week.
Keep It Simple
Your institutional-grade growth portfolio packed with artificial intelligence (AI) stocks, cryptocurrencies and alternative investments might be exotic and exciting, but it's loaded with so much risk that it's just this side of a get-rich-quick scheme.
Low-cost, passively managed S&P 500 exchange-traded funds (ETFs) aren't nearly as sexy, but the United States large-cap market has spent the last century delivering 10% annualized returns, on average, as trends, fads and speculative bubbles came and went in the background.
Few people in the world know more about how old-school money habits can build and preserve wealth than 95-year-old Berkshire Hathaway founder Warren Buffett, who has encouraged this simple yet effective strategy for decades. In 2018, USA Today reported that Buffett had won his highly publicized 2007 bet that a basic S&P index ETF would outperform Wall Street's top money managers over the next 10 years.
Never Borrow To Buy What You Can't Afford
While credit cards can provide valuable rewards, the people who earn the benefits are the ones who adopt their grandparents' cash-based mentalities -- if you don't have the money to cover the purchase, then you can't afford to buy it.
Although the Diners Club issued the first credit card in 1950, the concept of revolving debt didn't emerge until 1958. According to the St. Louis Fed, that's when the company that would become Visa first allowed borrowers to carry interest-accruing balances without paying in full every month.
It's been a downward slide ever since.
The most recent New York Fed data puts the U.S. cumulative credit card debt at $18.59 trillion, with average household balances approaching five figures in many states.
This article was provided by MoneyLion.com for informational purposes only and should not be construed as financial, legal or tax advice.
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