A penny saved is a penny earned is not what Franklin wrote

Everything here earned its place by changing an outcome. Nothing about the penny saved proverb is included to round the number up.

What the almanac actually says

The annual almanac Franklin published under a pen name is full of proverbs, many of them collected and reworked rather than invented. Its version of this saying compares a penny saved to twopence earned, or in another phrasing to a penny got, which is a different claim. Twopence is the interesting number, because it makes an argument rather than merely stating an equivalence.

The claim is that avoiding an expense is worth more than earning the same amount, because earnings are reduced before they reach you. That is a sharper piece of financial reasoning than the flat version everyone quotes, and it has been sanded off.

The wording that predates him

The familiar phrasing appears in English printed sources before Franklin was born, in collections of proverbs and in general writing. Proverbs of this kind rarely have an author, and tracing them usually produces an earliest known appearance rather than an origin. Franklin's contribution was to popularise a great many such sayings by putting them where people would read them annually.

Where the story actually begins, he was open about collecting rather than inventing, and said as much in the almanac itself. The attribution to him is therefore an understandable compression rather than a fabrication, which is a gentler failure than most.

Why the twopence version is better

Money you earn is generally reduced by tax and by the costs of earning it, so the amount that reaches your account is less than the amount you were paid. Money you do not spend is not reduced at all, which means avoided expenditure and additional earnings are not equivalent. The size of the gap depends entirely on your jurisdiction and circumstances, and can be large enough to change decisions.

This is why reducing a recurring cost can be worth considerably more effort than the headline figure suggests. The proverb in its original form is making exactly this point, and the modern version makes no point at all.

Where the reasoning stops working

The argument applies to money already earned and to expenses you actually control, which is a smaller category than it first appears. Some spending buys time, capability or income later, and treating all outgoings as equivalent is how frugality turns into false economy.

Tested properly, the effort spent saving small amounts also has a value, and beyond a point it would be better spent on earning or on something else entirely. Tax treatment varies enormously between countries, so the size of the advantage is a local question rather than a universal one. Anyone making decisions that depend on the specifics should check their own rules or take regulated advice rather than trusting a proverb.

How proverbs get simplified

A saying with an extra clause is harder to remember, so the clause tends to fall away over generations of repetition. What survives is usually the rhythm rather than the argument, and this one has a satisfying symmetry that the original lacked. Symmetry makes a phrase memorable and also makes it vacuous, since a penny equalling a penny states nothing.

Trace it back and the same erosion has flattened many proverbs into tautologies that sound wise while asserting nothing at all. Restoring the missing clause usually restores the point, which is a good general test to run on any saying you find yourself quoting.

Printing a correction has a poor record of taking a myth out of circulation.

Franklin's actual advice

The almanac's financial sayings are consistently about the compounding effect of small recurring habits rather than about single decisions. Several concern the cost of credit and the difficulty of getting out of debt once in it, in language that has not dated much.

The primary source says otherwise: others concern the tendency of small regular expenses to accumulate unnoticed, which remains one of the more useful things to know about money. The material is genuinely good, and it is a shame that the one line everyone knows is the one he did not write in that form. Reading the original entries is more rewarding than the quotation, which is true of nearly every famous attributed line.

Everything above, in order of what to do first

1. What the almanac actually says. The annual almanac Franklin published under a pen name is full of proverbs, many of them collected and reworked rather than invented.
2. The wording that predates him. The familiar phrasing appears in English printed sources before Franklin was born, in collections of proverbs and in general writing.
3. Why the twopence version is better. Money you earn is generally reduced by tax and by the costs of earning it, so the amount that reaches your account is less than the amount you were paid.
4. Where the reasoning stops working. The argument applies to money already earned and to expenses you actually control, which is a smaller category than it first appears.
5. How proverbs get simplified. A saying with an extra clause is harder to remember, so the clause tends to fall away over generations of repetition.
6. Franklin's actual advice. The almanac's financial sayings are consistently about the compounding effect of small recurring habits rather than about single decisions.

The takeaway

The version he printed made an argument about tax. The version we remember makes no argument at all.

Believing it was ordinary. Continuing to is the avoidable part.