Georgia saver practices what he preaches
Preaching the Blessings of Saving
Long before America Saves was conceived, Walter Bussey was a one-man savings campaign. He set goals, put aside money regularly, and watched the savings mount up over time. Then he used what he had learned to motivate others to do the same.
For Mr. Bussey the blessings of saving are a matter of faith. “God helps those who help themselves,” he says. In other words, if you want to prosper, you have to do something to make that happen. You have to save. To do that, he tells people, you have to “set a goal that you can reach. If you reach the goal quick, set the goal a little higher,” and just keep going.
That is a message Mr. Bussey has shared for years with the young people in his church and more recently as a participant in the Columbus, Georgia pilot project for Georgia Saves. The 75-year-old brings a lifetime of experience to this calling. As a boy, he earned five dollars a week, turned it over to his mother, and got back 25 cents to keep as his own. He saved that weekly quarter until he had enough to buy himself a $15 bicycle.
Which leads to another of Mr. Bussey’s lessons – no amount of money is too small to save. “You can save but a quarter, anything, so long as you save.” And he encourages the young people he shares his message with to start young. “If you save a dollar a day,” he tells them, “by the time you’re 18, you’ll be able to pay your own way through college, buy your own car.”
Mr. Bussey doesn’t just talk the talk. When Georgia started its state lottery in the early 1990s, he told himself, “I’m not going to play that thing. I’m going to play the Bussey lottery.” So he started putting $1 a day, or $30 a month, into savings. At the end of the first year, he had $360. “I said, `That’s pretty good. I think I’ll pay $2 a day in the Bussey lottery.” That year, he saved $720. “I went down to the bank and bought a CD for $1,000.”
That got him “motivated into saving,” Mr. Bussey said. He set himself two goals. One was to pay his mortgage off early. The other was to save $20,000 by the year 2000.
“I found good things don’t cost very much, and bad things cost a lot,” Mr. Bussey said. “So, I eliminated all the bad things,” he said. He stopped smoking. He stopped “partying.” And he started saving $500 a month. Each month he deposited that money in a $500 CD, until he had acquired so many, the bank told him he had to start buying his CDs in $1,000 denominations.
With the benefits of compound interest, he’d saved $26,000 by 2000 – thirty percent more than the goal he had set. He also paid a little extra each month on his mortgage, with the result that he paid it off eight years early in 1998.
Retired and debt-free, Mr. Bussey still saves $300 month. His goal now is less concrete – financial freedom. “I do what I want to do,” he said. “I buy what I want to buy. Your last years should be your best.”
“You can save but a quarter, anything, so long as you save.” --Walter Bussey