THE ART OF SAVING

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 1, Issue 2, 24 April 1939, Page 7

THE ART OF SAVING

"MOST DIFFICULT LESSON" BIGGEST WORRY WAS CLOTHES s I've just mastered the most diffii cult lesson of my life—and the most 1 exciting. I've learned how to save ; money, says a writer in. an exchange. 2 For years I lived, up to vfy income s spending gaily on the principle of . "eat, drink and be for toi morrow we die- " But last year I near, sly did die —from pneumonia.—and suddenly remembered another saying,, about a fool and his money. 1 When I recovered I was faced withj 2 an appalling pile of bills and nothing to pay them with. I. managed to i dispose of them all only after months of worry. Then I decided my next job must be to learn saviog as a fine 3 art. I soon found that the only way' of . making money stay in my pocket, or even in the house, was to be me« thodical about its distribution. The - trouble is that I was not born with •, an orderly mind. I'd always paid bills as they came t. in, gaily assuming there was enough money in the bank to meet them. Now I realised that I must put aside >. a sfmall sum every week to meet every kind of expenditure. So as I'm a perfect fool at mental _ I got a notebook and collected a number of cigarette boxes. These, I decided in my new fit of economy, should be money-boxes un_ til I had a nice little sum in re£ d ~ savings. ** I made several calculations, with _ the result that every week a fixed

sum went into each box out of my income.. Rent, telephone, gas, electric light clothes, -holidays, season ticket, amusements and doctor said the labels on the boxes. My biggest worry was clothes. I had long ago discovered that cheap clothes are often expensive in the long run. Whereas good material comes back life new from the clean. e r"s the life of a good silk lining is a long one: and a suit which is well made keeps its air of elcgance to the bitter end. A small wardrobe and a good one was my motto. But I found that 1 could economise by making many of my clothes interchangeable, so that one jacket could be worn with two or even, thr e e skirts or frocks, and bv sticking to a carefully-thought-out, but limited colour scheme, I could make outtfis do double duty. Well, my economy system worked. As the bills came in, so they wer<4 paid out of cash in hand and as T got used to handling my money sensibly, my bany balance began to go up as weM. I had my bad moments of course. I had a shock one day when I realised that I was getting to enjoy my saving so much that I had not only become careful, but also a: trifld mean. That had to be dealt with. And now I've learned my lesson. It wasn't easy, though it may sound like it. But, on the it's been" fun.