Jay Leno: This is How to Stay Out of Debt

NBC "The Tonight Show" comedy host Jay Leno was the funniest comedian of the three plus comedians who tried to carry a late-night talk show. He was witty, mocked both sides of the aisle, stayed away from embittered political punditry. He also relied on submissions of funny photos from the audience. Having watched some of Johnny Carson's segments from previous broadcasts, I think that Leno was funnier than Carson.

When Leno went among the public to question them about basic current events, he poked fun at their lack of knowledge, but never trashed them or made them feel about themselves. He made fun, but he wasn't cruel or bitter. At the beginning of every show, Leno reached out the audience and connected with as many of them as he could.

And he was a tireless worker. He did a nightly return at the Comedy and Magic Club in Hermosa Beach to make sure that he stayed fresh and vibrant. His temperament on screen and off indicated that he had a centrist, perhaps even conservative leaning mindset.

Lo and behold, the way he managed money in his private life, from his first career to the present, suggested a strong fiscal discipline which all of us could learn from.

CNBC reports:

Jay Leno never carried debt, even before he was a big earner. He stayed out of the red thanks to one simple strategy: He didn't buy on credit.

"I rarely used credit cards," the comedian tells CNBC Make It. "I didn't buy anything I couldn't afford to pay for in cash. I always liked, 'Here is the money, give me the thing, transaction over.'"

Makes sense. Don't get into a habit of going on credit if you have the money to begin with.

Leno started his career with a minimum wage job at a McDonald's as a teen. A few years later, when he was jump-starting his career as a comedian, he had to supplement his comedy gig earnings with money he made working at a car dealership. At first, the paycheck from the dealership was the bigger of the two, so he banked that and lived off the other.

He started hosting "The Tonight Show" in 1992 at age 42, a job that reportedly earned him as much as $30 million a year. But even today, he prefers not to pay for anything in installments, he tells CNBC Make It: "When you own something and you don't have to write checks every month, you're just better off."

This conservative philosophy gives him financial peace of mind. "I own everything. I own my buildings. I own my cars. That way, if it ends tomorrow, I know what I've got," says Leno, who now hosts CNBC's "Jay Leno's Garage." "It's a little old fashioned, I suppose, but it seems to work pretty well for me."

When you're getting started as an independent adult, it's important to establish good credit — that will allow you to make larger purchases in the future, such as a car or a home — and one way to do so is by opening a credit card. The good news is, if you stick to a few basic guidelines, you can easily use one without going into debt.

But if you find yourself not making payments in full, or if you have already racked up credit card debt, Leno's cash-only solution may work for you.

There's more to the story. Where did Leno learn these habits?

From this parents, who had survived the depression. They knew what it was like to live in dire poverty, and not know when they would get out of it. A generation of Americans died with all their life savings saved in mattresses in their homes because they had lost all their money when the stock markets crashed in 1929, and then financial liquidity dried up all over the world because of bank runs and government meddling.

Leno's parents taught him to live frugally, turn off the extra heat, electricity, etc. These habits are good to build upon. Leno has a thriving business, life, practice, everything. He has done quite well for himself, one could say.

Stay out of debt, pay with cash when you can, work, save, invest, and live well.

RIP Don Rickles: Mr. Anti-PC Comedy, You Will Be Missed (Here's a Cookie!)

Don Rickles has died. I pray that his tribe increases.

Mr. Comedy was so refreshingly anti-politically correct (PC). We need that, desperately.

If he were a budding comedian in this day and age, his career would have died after one day on the stage. Imagine the SJWs crawling all over the stage and pushing this doddering grandpa off the stage … for good!

Rickles knew how to rib everyone and touch the hot-button issues. But he wasn’t vulgar or mean-spirited. He wasn’t a jerk.

Here were some of his best lines:

On the Tonight Show with Jay Leno: “You’re Chinese? That’s what they all say now that the war’s over!”

“I get nothing, and he gets a cookie.” That was a favorite (From Kelly’s Heroes).

As a guest on the Howard Stern Show, when Stern asked “What would you say was the lowest point in  your career?” Rickles’ response? “Being on this show now!”

By the way, throughout the whole taping, Howard Stern stood. There is no greater honor than for an interviewer to stand while you sit. And Rickles deserved it.

But this line is also legendary:

“Who broke my cigarette case?”

Ok, the last one wasn’t from Don Rickles, but Johnny Carson, and it was the day after Rickles took over the Tonight Show while Carson was out. The next day, when the Tonight Show Host found out, Carson refused to take the destruction of his cigarette case sitting down, but marched over to the next TV studio down on the NBC lot and broke up the show. Funny stuff! Can you imagine that kind of impromptu clowning around today?

Don Rickles caused trouble, and he had no problem getting in trouble, either. He laughed and mocked other people, but he was the clown getting clowned on, too.

And now he has passed on.  A lot of celebrates are dying off. The loss of so many stars worried so many last year, that Betty White fans started a GoFundMe to make sure that she stayed alive through 2016!

But for Rickles, why would anyone need to make sure he stayed alive? There’s something about comedians who can make anyone laugh, young or old, and keep doing so well into their later years. Rodney Dangerfield couldn’t do that. The “No Respect” routine can’t carry a comic forever. In his later years, Rodney got bitter, high on pot, and then flamed out.

But Rickles, this guy remained a live wire. I wonder how he will feel when he finds out that he’s dead!

What was it about Don Rickles that I really liked?

He was not offensive.

That’s right. For a comedian who ran on a persona of constantly insulting people, he never really hurt people’s feelings. We all knew what a great guy he was. He was not mean, hateful, or bitter. Bitter, blue humor dominates the shtick of hacks like Bill Maher and David Letterman. Bill Maher is a cable show also-ran at this point, and Letterman has retired—nobody misses him.

But he wasn’t an annoying wannabe like Red Skelton, who was just too nice.

Rickles was the warmest grouch you could ever meet. His whole routine revolved around an old, bald Jewish schmuck out to grouch at anyone who didn’t look like him.

Another one of Rickles’ great lines: “You know, every night when I go out on stage, there's always one nagging fear in the back of my mind. I'm always afraid that somewhere out there, there is one person in the audience that I'm not going to offend!”

But that’s the thing. His humor never really offended anyone.

Why was that? Because even though he was “attacking others”, we were really laughing at him.

There was a real charm to this kind of stand-up comedy.

He was making fun of us—but he was ultimately making fun of himself.

I mean, would anyone really take the outrageous things he had said seriously? The one-liners were so outrageous, but also inherently backward, like the crack about the Asian guy. He told that joke in the early 2000s. People got the context, but also could hear it and see a guy who is so out of touch with the common times, that it’s funny.

He jibed at us, we laughed at him—but we all ended up laughing together.

Now that’s really good comedy.

Jay Leno followed that kind of tradition, I think, and that’s why I was sad to see him go, too—from television, that is.

What a sad day for this country. Rickles’ ticklish brand of Anti-PC insult comedy has passed away, too, and what do we have left? Angry comedians who just stab at everyone and don’t care whether you laugh or not. Bill Maher is particularly unfunny, not just because he’s a liberal, but a brazen liar who thinks that he is telling the truth. A bitter fraud, to say the least. Any Schumer is ugly, both inside and outside, and continues playing her slattern routine to no effect.

They are vulgar, not edgy, and they give off a hateful veneer that you the audience are a bunch of patsies. And who can forget Wanda Sykes going after Trump one evening in a Boston theater? She got booed big time. Why? Because she was attacking a man who spoke for many in America.

Remember, Rickles would mock you and me, but really he gave us a reason to laugh at him.

I wish he had lasted a few more years. The PC cult has overwhelmed us, and we are only beginning to fight back. As far as I know, Jerry Seinfeld, another great comedian with a different worldview and comedic bent, admitted that he would never do colleges again.

A Don Rickles college tour would have been just the thing to cap off a long and successful career for a comedian who knew how to make us laugh—both at himself and with himself.

RIP Don Rickles—you win a cookie!