MEN with great natural aptitude as money-makers often administer their finances badly and receive practically no benefit from the money they earn. Perhaps they are extravagant, or inefficient spenders. More frequently such men are poor investors. In the use of money, in its employment and administration, investment is fully as important as saving. Indeed saving in itself is merely a primary or elementary stage which precedes investing.

Any one who adopts a policy of saving should automatically adopt a policy of investing, because savings will return the surest and greatest benefits only when productively employed. Not to invest what one has saved is like putting a boy through a long technical course at college at great sacrifice to the parents and then letting him remain idle.

The truth is that the word thrift means increasing one's money through wise and conservative investments just as much as it includes the original earning of money and the ability to keep it by cutting out extravagance and waste.

This is not the place to try to tell how much hard-earned and in many cases hard-saved money is lost through ill advised investments. Suffice it to say that hundreds of thousands of earnest, devoted, serious-minded men and women have learned the lesson of economy, even of privation, only to lose every cent.

I am not at all sure but that extravagance and even waste are better than poor investment. Perhaps there is some moral discipline, some chastening of the spirit, in working early and late for years and then losing one's all. But that is too bitter a philosophy. Better far to "blow in" one's money, and have a good time. If you can't invest safely then by all means stop saving money now and spend your money while it lasts.

A great many people lose money because they never try to learn anything about investing it. They regard the subject as a difficult one, and then when they have money to put to work, are easily misled through their ignorance. Vast sums have been lost because the owners, and this applies perhaps more to women than to men, are afraid of the word FINANCE. It sounds dry and difficult, so they leave it alone.

"I don't know anything about finance" is the half despairing, half apologetic statement made to me by scores of women.

But safe investment is not a matter of finance at all, primarily. It is a matter of common sense and suitability, as I shall endeavor to show in the next few chapters. There is no excuse for not knowing something about it, any more than for most people in this country is there excuse for not learning to read and write.

The great advantage of investing money over merely sticking it away in an old box is that it will work for you. We speak of people living on their incomes. Well, that is merely a case of money working instead of the owners working. Most of us have no respect for persons who are always idle, living entirely on their income all their lives. But we are just as firmly convinced, at least most of us are, that when people work hard for money there is no crime in the money working for them later on when they grow old or become incapacitated.

Money earns what is called interest, which is nothing but a sort of back salary to those who have denied themselves the immediate pleasures of spending in order to assure to themselves the future benefits. If working money did not earn interest, all but a few misers who love gold just because of its looks would spend it at once.

Not only does money earn interest (if it is safely invested) but there is such a thing as compound interest. If you put one hundred dollars in a bank at four per cent. for a year, at the end of one year there will be one hundred and four dollars and the next year the bank will pay four per cent. on one hundred and four dollars instead of on one hundred. In this way small humble sums mount rapidly to impressive totals. Many a fortune has started this way, for when a man commences to invest money, he has started a snowball rolling downhill; and it keeps growing larger at a rate that astonishes those who never had experience in such matters.

The silent but incessant workings of compound interest are well illustrated by the following tabulation: $1,000 with Interest Compounded Annually.

In fifty years one thousand dollars will grow to seven thousand two hundred and forty-two dollars with no further investment. Of course very few depositors would live to benefit from a fifty-year deposit, but every now and then we read in the newspapers about a savings-bank account which has lain dormant for a number of years. The depositor has died or moved away and forgotten all about the account he started in the bank. Then a claimant for the account comes to light, and it is found that compound interest has largely increased the original account, and in some cases, what was only a small surplus has, by the lapse of years and the steady operation of compound interest, become a modest fortune.

In an effort to induce people to save and invest, a great many articles have been published in newspapers and magazines showing by figures what compound interest will accomplish. Many of these tabulations are confusing and still more are misleading, because it is not easy to compound interest at five, six or seven per cent., as so lightly assumed by many writers on these subjects. It is far safer to assume that money is compounded at four per cent. because practically all savings-banks pay that rate.

Compound interest is not in itself an important element in saving money by itself. If you deposit one dollar and add nothing to it generations must elapse before that dollar grows into a really large sum, even though at four per cent. it doubles itself in about eighteen years. But compound interest becomes a factor to reckon with when to a small original sum moderate amounts are regularly and persistently added.

A young man with a salary of twenty dollars a week might in many cases save five dollars a week. Perhaps few of my readers realize that by putting five dollars a week in the savings-bank there will in twenty-eight years be accumulated a sum large enough to itself earn interest of twenty dollars a week, assuming that as soon as one thousand dollars are accumulated in the bank at four per cent. interest, it be removed and safely invested in six per cent. mortgages, a fairly reasonable assumption. You can figure this easily for yourself. Even one dollar a week will do wonders. If you persistently deposit every week in the savings-bank, assuming that the interest rate remains at four per cent. the result will be as follows: $1 a week in five years will be $ 286.00 $1 a week in ten years will be $ 634.64 $5 a week in five years will be $1,430.48 $5 a week in ten years will be $3,174.10

To invest what you save from your earnings and reinvest what you earn from your savings is a good rule for getting on in the world. Interest upon interest, that is the secret, combined with frugality and sound investment, of many big fortunes.