The Death of the Yuppie. (Finally.)

And no disasters. The plain vanilla approach spared Beneficial from the woes of Citibank and Wachovia, and now, many find its old-school approach incredibly inviting. “I got a call from a Fortune 500 company that wants to deposit its money here,” Cuddy says. Dull is the new sexy.

A return to the safe way of doing things isn’t unexpected after this financial meltdown, and Cuddy believes it’s not only companies that will be doing it — or that need to. He pulls out some charts that are part of a presentation on savings he recently gave to a group of Philly high-schoolers. They tell the story of America’s relationship with money and spending over the past half-century: the conservative, save-until-you-can-afford-it approach of the 1950s; the emergence of charge cards in the 1960s and ’70s (though back then, people paid the full balance monthly — how quaint); the gold and platinum “status” cards that made the first yuppies swoon in the 1980s. The latest trend is what credit-card companies call, no joke, “debt for life” — carrying a balance with you into your grave (paying interest every month until you get there). From the industry’s point of view, it’s been a remarkably successful strategy: Since 1980, America’s revolving debt — most of it due to credit cards — skyrocketed from $52 billion to $950 billion.

What Cuddy and others see coming, largely out of necessity, is a reaction to that debt-fueled spending — a return to frugality, or, to use a word favored by quintessential Philadelphian Ben Franklin, thrift. (“Beware of little expenses, a small leak will sink a great ship,” Ben once said.) To yuppie ears, “thrift” is a pretty unappealing term, since it implies being not just tight-fisted, but tight-assed. What’s fascinating, though, is that the principle underlying it is the same one underlying a trend almost everyone agrees is crucial to our future: being green.

Now, from one perspective, green isn’t an anti-yuppie phenomenon — it’s the ultimate yuppie phenomenon. At its worst, it’s self-important (only we can save the world!) and smug (I’m reducing my carbon footprint — what are you doing?) and offers another excuse to buy more high-priced stuff (including those contradictions on wheels, hybrid SUVs). But shift the point of view slightly, and green can actually sound like the sort of common-sense, no-BS philosophy our grandparents and great-grandparents would understand instantly: There isn’t enough energy to go around, so don’t go taking any more than you have to. And for heaven’s sake, don’t waste any. Or even Ben Franklin: Waste not, want not.

Put these two forces — frugality and sustainability — together, and what you see forming is a new sense of, well, responsibility — a renewed recognition that you can’t just do any damn thing you please and have it turn out all right in the end. A reawakened awareness that what one person does actually may have an impact on somebody else. Sound boring and earnest? Well, yeah — if your idea of a good time is charging something on your black Am Ex, then rubbing your neighbor’s nose in it. But on a deeper, dare I say more grown-up level, it could actually be kind of thrilling, since it will allow us to take all the time and energy we’ve spent acquiring stuff for the past 25 years and refocus it on solving some of the problems we’ve been ignoring, like a seriously screwed-up health-care system and a decaying infrastructure nationally, and in Philly, a bloated city government, schools that don’t work properly, and an inner-city culture in which three-quarters of kids grow up fatherless, and poverty gets handed down from one generation to the next.