Budget-wise wives

Paula Davies appeals to
AT some time or other you must have read about those paragons of housewives who manage to feed a family of six on £2 a week. But you never actually meet them to find out how. Someone you may meet, however, is that efficient piece of machinery that goes by the name of a budgetconscious woman.
She has her finances highly organised. She pays her bills on the nail. She always seems to be able to balance her books. Even at Christmastime she will have the whole exercise mapped out to ensure that the money allowed for Christmas is put to its best use.
Christmas and saving money mix about as easily as oil and water. What with devaluation, the dock strike, foot and mouth, teachers refusing meal duties, railwaymen rowing about guards having no guards' vans, the cost of Christmas this year will be higher than ever before and the need for careful budgeting more urgent. All we need now is fowl-pest to complete a. chapter of disasters by killing off the traditional turkey. Budgeting for Christmas is no easy task except for the super efficient. One has to remember so much and try not to spend too much, But whether you deploy what money you have sensibly will depend more on temperament than knowledge, on self-discipline rather than necessity,
If you are the sort to throw caution to the winds at anytime of year Christmas will he your Waterloo, or perhaps I should say Carey Street. If you are the sort who buys avocados instead of potatoes, Christmas is going to find you buying marrons glaces instead of plain chestnuts, pate de foie instead of chicken liver pate. If you are the sort, however, who walks to a further bus stop to save 6d. you'll always be more than just solvent for you are never likely to buy anything on impulse.
It is so much easier to organise someone else's budget rather than one's own. Obviously everything should be written down if you want to find out where the money goes. But how many people bother to do this?
According to an accountant 90 per cent of people budget unconsciously and rarely, if ever, do they write anything down on paper. One woman I know who keeps no records says that she borrows from her own purse if the housekeeping money runs out and pays herself back the following week.
Another with a completely different temperament will just do without if her housekeeping money runs out too early. 'I'll dig something out of the store cupboard rather than go over my budget."
So far as we are concerned the only time anything is written down is at Christmas. Like most wives I am lumbered with all the Christmas arrangements, from food shopping and cooking to buying all the presents.
Naturally I write the cost of everything down so that my husband can see what Christmas costs are going to be. Obviously what one should do is allocate a certain sum of money for Christmas and stick to it.
The rest of the year is even less well organised, although we do have a system which gives us a tough idea of where the money goes. Primitive but effective is probably the best description of box-controlled budgeting. Fixed allowances for different things arc put, once a month, in labelled boxes, ranging from a kid's shoe box to a cigarette packet. The housekeeping lives in a shirts/pyjamas drawer, while the entertainment money (occasionally a sub for the housekeeping) nestles beside a hair piece in a wig box. An allowance for the children's clothes lives next to their Post Office books in a box whose origins are now obscured by time.
Although a Heath-Robinson system that no really efficient person would contemplate, the box system works reasonably well for us. But I am sure that someone, somewhere has a much better and more ingenious way of doing things.
If you reckon you have the ideal budgeting system, please write and tell me about it.
EVERYONE has heard of -11-1 Irish coffee, that delicious concoction of whiskey, black coffee and cream. Coffee D.O.M. is the same idea but you use Benedictine instead.
The idea is to pour a generous amount of the liqueur into a warmed glass, add hot black coffee and a topping of double cream. Never stir the "brew" for the object of the exercise is to drink the Benedictine-laced coffee through the cream.