‘The Reluctant Money-Minder’

Press, 13 August 1980, Page 12

‘The Reluctant Money-Minder’

“Eve always known at the back of my .mind that I’d have -to hire' a woman some day but I didn’t know how to go about finding one,” said the editor of Britain’s prestigious Financial Times; and the only excuse you can make for the wretched man is that this was .way' back in 1958.

He was responding to the only woman' who had ever actually written and asked him for a job on the financial side — Sheila Black, now Britain’s best-known female adviser on money.

She has just got out a book called “The Reluctant Money-Minder,” for women who need to know about stocks and bonds and tax and savings, whether they’re really interested or not. Sheila Black did not arrive at the Financial Times at the end of a classic production-line of maths, accountancy or economics — “anyway economists are two a penny,” said that editor. She came by a series of jumps and starts which included being an actress — but she was .caught by the beginning of World War 11.

“I was on stage when the curtain came down; when it went up again I was pregnant so that u r as that.” . She worked with the production manager of an

electrical engineering firm, carting two toddlers off to ’ nursery school each morning. “I was so lucky to be a young mother in the war,” she says, with a wry sideways glance at Britain’s lack of day nurseries now.“All you had to do was give them hot milk and Jove ■ — the nursery did tire rest.” Then she did-“the most utterly s(upid thing of her life” and retired — briefly — from work and from London. After 18 months in the country both she and her husband were frantic enough to admit their mistake and move thankfully back to town.

She has built up a fashion accessories firm, married twice, done a bit of car testing, and been a director of a big chain of department stores. She did a consumer column on Britain’s “The Times” newspaper until its long drawn out closure gave her a chance to realise how much she loathes doing consumer journalism, with or without pictures.

She runs a publication called, the “Women’s Financial Letter,” which h a. s just changed its name to “Yours Financially” on the grounds that when you come down to it, women need to know exactly the same things about money as men. But when it comes to attitudes, women are different: and Sheila knows it. Men want money because that’s how you keep score, because it shows them how far .they’ve reached in the race; .because it makes them feel secure and rings up a

definite quantity of maclio.;. ’AVomen want money to buy things. This,-- obviously,- is why it’s so difficult to get them to think about bonds and tax and stocks when they-don’t have to — not because thhre is some special dainty/'language in which they must be addressed before they are likely to understand such things. “The most important thing about money,” says Sheila Black, “is to know the sort of person you are. It’s no good a gambler trying to be sensible or the sock-under-the-bed type trying to pull off great gambles — it just doesn’t work. You want to work out what you need the money for.” Someone once suggested a sdber, long-term course df action to her; “I am just, temperamentally un-

suited- to- being that sensible,she said firmly. t" But she’s got enough things right “not to have to be frightened of my old age, and that’s all anyone heeds.” You couldn’t tell it ’n Howard • Hughes or Onassis; I aouut if y~u could tell it to grgat little gold-lovers like Mary Pickford or Zsa Zsa Gabor either. But for most of us, that’s the authentic note. Money is a new coat er a boat or not having to borrow the cab-fare home; it is a necklace and vacations and a chance to spit in some man’s eye. Not even Sheila Black can make it interesting in itself — but she can make us overcome our boredom with its details for just long enough to enable us to make some; or at least to think we may — which is more than half the battle.