25 "SECRET" Old Fashioned Amish Money Rules Since the 1850s That Kept Families Debt Free

Subscribe to the channel:    / @forgottenfrugalamerica   👉Start saving $5000 a year: forgottenfrugalamerica.netlify.app In 1953, a Lancaster County dairy farmer named Amos Stoltzfus bought a 90-acre farm in Pennsylvania for $14,000. He paid cash. He was thirty-one years old, had eight children, no electricity, and no checking account at any bank. The money came from a wooden box buried under the floorboards of his father's milk house. Three generations had been filling that box since 1871. When Amos died in 2004, the box held $186,000. None of it had ever earned interest. None of it had ever needed to. The Amish do not borrow. They have not borrowed for almost two hundred years. And the rules that made that possible were never written in any book the English were allowed to read. They lived differently. Not because they were behind the times, but because they refused to enter them. While the rest of America financed cars, homes, and educations on debt that compounded for forty years, the Amish stayed cash. We called it stubborn. We called it backward. We are now the most indebted civilization in human history, and they are not. The rules that kept them out of the trap were quiet, communal, and almost invisible to outsiders. Number 19 on this list is the reason no Amish family has ever filed for bankruptcy in recorded American history. Number 11 saved the average young man $22,000 before his wedding day and cost nothing to implement. And number three — the single rule the bishop enforced more strictly than any other — is why an Amish farmer in 2024 can still buy a farm in cash while his English neighbor cannot make the mortgage on a tract house. These 25 rules were not about being plain. They were about being free. Free from the bank, free from the lender, free from the slow erosion of a man who owes more than he owns. Hit that subscribe button. Let us count down the 25 secret old fashioned money rules the Amish have followed since the 1850s that kept every family debt free for life.