While working on the Kekaha Sugar Company plantation over many years, lifetime Kekaha resident Timotea Munar religiously saved her earnings with the Kekaha credit union and also made sure her children understood the value of saving, by walking the kids into the credit union when it was located across from the plantation mill.
While working on the Kekaha Sugar Company plantation over many years, lifetime Kekaha resident Timotea Munar religiously saved her earnings with the Kekaha credit union and also made sure her children understood the value of saving, by walking the kids into the credit union when it was located across from the plantation mill.
They would deposit a portion of their paycheck to their savings accounts, and also put $20 in each of their children’s accounts. It’s a practice Timotea continued with all four of her children.
A generation later, the plantation fields are gone, Timotea continues to set up savings accounts for each of her grandchildren — including Maica, 8, perpetuating a tradition of thoughtful saving and growth.
It is no small accomplishment to reach the age of 83, having provided for four kids and having done so debt-free. Some ofher children have moved on, but Kekaha is still home to them — a place to return to, remaining secure in their hearts.
They have gone off to school and started families and careers of their own — choices made possible by the wisdom of their parents and the trust the credit union always had in the people of Kekaha.
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The Garden Island
Aloha Kakou,
It seemed like this wonderful story of people and their children and grandchildren being financial savers was going to take us to an even more wonderful continuation and conclusion of what SAVING your money can do for you…on Kaua’i, or anywhere really.
However, the story sort of just melted away and it seemed like the same may have happened to the grandchildren, leaving or moving from Kaua’i to only having it as a place to return to, though that in itself is a great value. Maybe I misssed the intention of the article and its real outcome.
Let me finish the story of SAVINGS the way I have seen others on Kauai be successful at it.
Saving $$$ is not to have something to just sit around and count as the years go on, certainly you cannot take it with you.
In these changing times for many on Kaua’i, saving your money, can mean staying on Kaua’i, if that is what you want for yourself and your children and their children, keeping generations of families together as Kaua’i still has so many of today.
And yes for some Born on Kaua’i, the big cities, even past HONOLULU, or past the U.S. Borders, holds attraction. But too often over time, the city life or just another different way of life attraction wears out and returning to Kaua’i, even a more developed island than the one you left, is still a kindred spirit and the place with your real family and familiar faces and places..instead of a land of strangers.
So what are there reasons for saving? If one starts young and sticks to SAVING some of every paycheck, or 2 or more in a family or even friends individually save from their youth into adulthood, they can buy the bare aina and build on it suitably for a single or multi family home, or trade up and have their own separate homes, that added onto can become multi family homes. Our new Mayor, Derek, and I quote, he stated at at least one Coincil Meeting, that Kaua’i needs 3 and 4 story homes, something we need to keep families together.
But something wonderful for seniors is that if they would have saved from their youth or even as adults, and they can own or develop small investment property that can provide more than, or in addition to, a Social Security or private retirement check…being a landlord and being able to not only provide comfortably for oneself in their senior years with rental income, but also provide for ones own following generations, not for free as free is not healthy, but at rental values affordable that keep families together or at rental rates that are affordable to others.
Saving can be and is as simple as less or none of wasting ones money on things that shorten your life, but instead saving that money. Throwing ones money away on alcohol, tobacco, and drugs is childish, selfish, and foolish, or even clothes rarely worn, or car expensive payments, that could mean a nice roof over your head + income as an adult or senior.
Savings accounts for young people, and separate savings accounts for family members and friends for HUI’s for AINA, should be taught in elementary and high school and college and at the dinner table.
Look to the future it’s waiting for you and yours.
Mahalo,
Charles