Sex and the Single Girl: The Unmarried Woman's Guide to Men (14 page)

You probably think you haven’t enough money to create this kind of illusion. As a matter of fact nobody ever has enough money to do what he is doing! Many seemingly wealthy families are hopelessly in hock. Staying solvent doesn’t seem to have so much to do with how much you earn as how you handle it. I have known girls making $100 a week who have bailed out their idiot boy friends who had $25,000-a-year salaries.

As a single, self-supporting woman you have one great financial advantage. People will
let
you live within your means. When you make cute little economies like riding a bicycle to work, everybody stands at the curb and cheers. Just try serving hot dogs and Kool-Aid at your barbecue if you’re wealthy!

Being smart about money is sexy. It is part of the attractive American career-girl image—being able to reconcile a checkbook, having something to
reconcile
, being able to pay your own way (only don’t you dare!).

Your opposite—the cashaholic who spends wildly to impress and is usually dodging creditors like hailstones—is one unattractive female. The man who tangles with
her
financial problems soon finds she’s one of
his
, and boy, does he hate it!

No matter how little money you make, you can live on it … attractively. I
know.

I was poor nearly always.

My father died when I was ten. A few years later my sister Mary got polio, and her subsequent hospital care and operations just about finished our insurance money. This was before the days of largess of the March of Dimes.

During the forties, Mary telephoned from her wheel chair for a radio survey company. Mother pinned little tickets on merchandise at Sears Roebuck’s marking room for fifty cents an hour. I answered fan mail at a radio station for six dollars a week while learning shorthand. We lived in a tiny house hard by the right of way of the Santa Fe. The
Super Chief
or
something
went by twice a night. Talk about suspended conversations! Underneath Mary’s and my bedroom, gophers were tunneling their way up. When the train wasn’t going by, you could hear them
scratch
,
scratch
,
scratching
! We never knew what night they might make it on through. To put it mildly, we lived frugally.

When Mother and Mary went back to my mother’s family in Arkansas to live, I stayed in Los Angeles, first sharing an apartment with roommates and then living in a small apartment of my own.

While continuing to work my way through those seventeen jobs and sending money home, I became a really ruthless pennypincher. Buffalo nickels were not only squeezed; they yowled in pain.

Some people, especially the poor, seem to think it is unattractive and miserly to watch pennies. Did they pay $5,000 cash from savings for a Mercedes-Benz 190 S. L. when their yearly income was $9,600? I did. (And I wasn’t kept!) But I drove a vintage Chevy and rode the streetcar for years.

Some of my save-money rules are too penurious (I know you’re going to draw the line at making your own candles!) for any but really lean years. They are compiled for people who may also be under more than ordinary financial pressure but are determined to live in style. When the heat is off, you can discard the really stingy rules. The guiding principles, however, can be adapted profitably to any income.

Here they are:

1. Scrimp on what isn’t sexy or beautiful or really any fun, so you can afford what is.
   
2. Don’t spend a sou on anything you don’t need. (You
   need
   iridescent gold eye shadow, but what about that essence-of-pine air purifier somebody was selling door-to-door?)
   
3. Never pay more when you can pay less. Marvelon shelf paper is Marvelon shelf paper whether you buy it in a department store or the outlet house, where it is ten cents a roll cheaper.
   
4. Economize on things that would bring you no extra happiness units if you spent twice as much. Are the guests really going to love you that much more and enjoy themselves double when you serve cracked Alaskan crab and jumbo prawns with cocktails instead of raw carrots and cauliflower with a good cheese dip?
   

These are the general Save Rules. Now for specifics.

Don’t subscribe to a newspaper if you see one at the office or can borrow your landlord’s.

Ditto magazines. Ask a friend to pass hers on after she’s read them.

Type your letters on company paper.

If
you
pay the utility bills, turn off the lights when you leave home.

Have a party line. If people are talking when you lift the receiver, hang up gently and wait five minutes. This etiquette, plus your being gone all day, should keep you two
off
speaking terms.

Don’t call the home folks—write letters. A dear friend of mine has a $45-a-month phone bill regularly and hasn’t had a new suit in three years.

Be sure the long-form income tax return isn’t for you. Twenty dollars invested with a tax man may save you $100, but let him be recommended by a friend.

Take extra jobs. Pressure-ridden executives work nights and weekends. Who are you to be too tired? If you type, someone can use you.

Don’t baby-sit for money. That’s beneath your dignity.

Give up smoking.

Carry some kind of hospital insurance, but modest. (I never carried
any
!) Because an appendectomy could ruin you.

Negotiate with doctors’ offices about bills (or get healthy—see Chapters 8 and 9). Wear your oldest clothes and emphasize your modest circumstances.

Negotiate with
everybody.
When my rent was $75, I wrote the management, a large corporation, and asked them to reduce it to $72.50, I pointed out I’d been a model tenant, my tiny income had many places to go; and, if their apartment should be vacant just
six weeks
, they would lose more than my $2.50 reduction would amount to in
three years
! The reduction came through! I saved $240 in eight years.

Write fan letters to big companies. Sometimes they send samples. I wrote the president of Woolite (for woolens) to say I’d successfully washed my hair in it, very much like wool at the time. He sent a dozen cartons.

Rodgers and Hammerstein sounds good all over the auditorium. Move out of the gallery when a date takes you.

Brush your teeth with baking soda. Nine cents a box, and there’s no finer dentifrice.

Men are to buy you cocktails. That’s no way for you to spend
your
money.

Don’t undertip. This little economy is unworthy of you.

Work for a rich man.

Get adopted by a wealthy couple.

What are you borrowing money for? I can’t think of anything that would justify it except major surgery, long unemployment, family members in trouble or your being sued.

I never borrowed money for anything in my life during my single years except $400 from my boss’ wife to augment a go-to-Europe fund. I didn’t spend it and brought it back. I never bought anything on time payments either. Nothing! And, as I have mentioned, nobody started out any poorer than I or with more financial obligations.

Under my system you start funds for the things you want—car, vacation, hi-fi, television, fur coat, furniture. You sneak up on these luxuries. When your fund is over the top, you buy! Or just have a general savings account, deplete it for the major purchase and pay back your bank account, sans interest.

However, not everybody is such a clever manager or thrifty shopper as I (i.e., everybody isn’t as stingy). If you need to borrow money, try to get it at the lowest possible rate of interest.

Most people have no idea what installment buying really costs. Sellers are careful to keep the actual rate of interest as secret as a numbered account in Switzerland. They only tell you what your monthly payments are. If you multiply monthly payments by the number of months you pay, subtract the original purchase price of your goodie from this total, the amount left
is
interest. Divide the original purchase price into this interest, and you will get the interest
rate.
Don’t be surprised if it’s 18 to 25 per cent.

It is usually better to borrow the money for your major purchase and pay cash, thereby getting a better purchase price to begin with.

Try to borrow the money from a bank for their minimum interest rate. This is done by having collateral to put up—a paid-for car, furniture, jewelry. In some states your salary will suffice, but the interest will be higher.

If you have no collateral, a solvent cosigner on your note may do the trick. This can be a benevolent boss or a dependable steady beau.

If you have no collateral to put up and no cosigner, bank interest rates can be as usurious as those of installment-plan sellers. It is not uncommon, at least in my home state of California, to pay l
³
/
₄
per cent per month on the unpaid balance. Sounds little-bitty, doesn’t it? It figures up to 15 per cent per year. If your payments extend over two years, the total interest is 30 per cent!

If you love him and he’s desperate … well that’s your business. People dear to you
are
sometimes caught short. Be sure it wasn’t his or her own foolishness which will be repeated as soon as he or she gets his hands on a new source of revenue—
yours
!

In asking for the money back (if you have to ask), wait a decent time but not an
indecent
time. To a forgetful borrower, old debts tend to grow as faint as the sound of butterfly wings in flight.

Don’t drive a too ambitious car too soon. It’s hardly even a decent status symbol anymore! My Chevy, Catherine Howard, drank $2 worth of gas a week, a quart of oil a month and was hardly sick a day in her life.

Carry minimum insurance and drive like a police prowl car.

Wash the car yourself.

Don’t re-tire; retread.

Walk.

Give up chewing gum, candy bars, starchy snacks, bread, jelly, preserves and soft drinks—all terrible for you anyhow.

Keep an almost bare cupboard.
You
don’t eat much. Who are those other people you’re feeding?

Cook with margarine.

Drink skim milk. It’s cheaper and keeps you skinnier!

Cook with
powdered
skim milk. One-third cup plus three-fourths cup of water makes one cup of milk loaded with minerals and vitamins and it tastes fine.

Whipping cream from a packaged mix is cheaper, less caloric per tablespoon and has more food value than real whipped cream. (Cooking with cream and butter does pile calories on you and the guests you presumably love—so watch it!)

Try to like kidneys, hearts, liver, brains. Every nutritionist says they give you more health returns than filet mignon. Oh yes … they cost one-sixth as much. (P. S. I never learned.)

Ask the waiter to put the meat from your plate in a Bowser bag. It’s for
your
breakfast, and you don’t care who knows it.

Posh lunches with girl friends are to celebrate raises. Any girl who doesn’t take her lunch to work three days a week is a spendthrift. Brown bag fare is healthier. Yogurt, carrot sticks and fruit are glamour-girl fodder. It’s cheaper. And who wants to spend noon hours in a noisy, second-rate restaurant when you can shop, stroll with a friend or sit in the sun?

Anyone
can take you to lunch. How bored can you be for one hour?

My eighteen-year-old stepson tells me girl friends pay for movies, gas and hamburgers when his allowance has run out, which is usually three weeks before it’s due. This kind of talk sends chills to the very marrow of his stepmother’s spine. When we got equal rights, that’s one I left gift-wrapped. Here’s
my
rule.
Never
go Dutch treat with a date unless he can’t even pay his rent (and are you
sure
you want him?), or it’s a project
you
promoted that
he
hates, like the ballet.

If you vacation with a man you aren’t engaged to (I assume you’re having an affair),
he
pays. You might, in a fit of generosity, kick in your plane fare; but, if the whole excursion is going to cost as much as if he weren’t along, why take him? You might meet someone who isn’t so stingy.

Give big parties with one or two friends but don’t B.Y.O.L. anybody. Who needs a party that isn’t free?

Buy half-gallon jugs of red table wine or rosé (chill this) and serve in a shimmering Blenko glass decanter. Drugged by your charm, aficionados will swear it’s Richebourg ’53.

Martinis of reasonably priced gin or vodka are the specialité de la maison. Those who drink aged Scotch or bourbon will have to bring flasks.

Don’t entertain deadbeats.

More money has been squandered at sales in the name of thrift than has been loaned to underprivileged countries. Sales are okay for
some
furniture, Christmas gifts, lingerie between assignations, and linens (but how many towels do you wear
out
in a year?).

Buying staples at outlet houses is fine, but they are there all year long, so hysteria needn’t prevail.

As for clothes, markdowns are usually things people didn’t like well enough to buy at the original price. Are they prettier now that they cost ten dollars less? I know girls who have closets full of bargains and not one thing that makes them feel fabulous when they walk into a room. Last month Anne succumbed to some glorious brown alligator pumps marked down from $70 to $32.50.
Queue
bargain! The only trouble is, Anne hasn’t anything brown in her entire wardrobe and has been wearing them with royal blue and purple costumes. Another thing, Anne doesn’t have decently heeled, un-scuffed
any
kind of shoes except the alligators. A little less time at the sale and a little more time at the boot … oh, well!

I know just two legitimate ways to buy clothes on sale. One is to keep your eye on a gown you’ve adored since its arrival but couldn’t afford because it wasn’t basic. If by some miracle it isn’t sold in several months, ask the salesgirl when it will be marked down. Attend the sale and grab it!