This Budget Business

New Zealand Listener, Volume 4, Issue 103, 13 June 1941, Page 43

This Budget Business

(Inspired by an A.C.E. Talk)

I bought a three-penny notebook and put down " Note-book 3d" as the first item. After that I went on from strength to strength, recording all the minutize of my rather hand-to-mouth existence — pennies for phone calls, lunch time buns, tramfares and threepenny Eskimo pies, It was an absorbing occupation. It absorbed all my spare time-not only the time spent in totalling up the shillings and pence columns on Saturday afternoons and anxiously comparing the balance shown in the note-book with the balance shown by my purse-but countless half hours stolen from business or social pursuits. I had the faculty of detaching myself completely from the life about me and letting my mind roam at will up the by-paths of consciousness in an attempt to discover just what had happened to that missing sixpence-half-penny. If I had been considering joining the Detective Branch of the Women’s Police it would have been excellent training in deductive methods. I would endeavour as far as possible to reconstruct the crime. When had I last seen the missing sixpence? I would ask myself. Then I would recall every moment of my spending time since then. I would pounce upon the solution to the mystery with as much avidity as Hercule Poirot upon a corpse, or Madame Curie upon a spare ounce of radium. After a month, however, I began to notice that my character was becoming i ONCE started keeping a budget.

unpleasantly warped. I was beginning to realise the enormous importance of money. I would eat my lunch-time bun without butter to save an extra penny. I would avoid spending money on hitherto unconsidered trifles to save myself the effort of putting the item down in my note-book. When I took my friends out to lunch I myself would choose the cheapest item on the menu. I can pride myself on only one thing -I never sent my relatives unstamped letters. One by one my friends dropped away. At the end of two months I had saved five pounds, and had come to the end of the notebook. I looked wistfully at the old one but even the backs of the pages were filled. So I bought another one. This time it cost me only a penny, because I decided to rule the cash columns myself. Next morning found me at the Savings Bank filling in a deposit form and at the same time working out the interest on five pounds for one year at 2%4%.I1 signed my name with a flourish at the bottom of the form and looked in my purse. The money had gone. : Since then I have never kept a budget. I don’t get the time because I’m always dashing from place to place with one or another of my many friends. Discerning readers will find, a moral in this cautionary tale. Maybe it should have been a National Savings Account.

M.

I.