Book Review: The Financially Confident Woman (1996)

A Fair Trade Book

Title: The Financially Confident Woman 

(What I have in real life, and review here, is the 1996 edition of this book. A 2008 edition and a 2015 edition exist. I don't know to what extent they address the issues raised in this review.)

Author: Mary Hunt

Author's web site: https://www.everydaycheapskate.com/

Date: 1996

Publisher: Broadman & Holman

ISBN: 0-8054-6285-6

Length: 214 pages

Quote: “I hope you like my book, that it entertains you and...makes you confident that with God's power you can change...If you are searching for quick fixes or ways to manipulate your present situation to qualify for more debt, this may not be the book for you.”

Mary Hunt has built a career around frugality, making her one of the great legendary Creative Tightwads of all time. Her Cheapskate Monthly newsletter documented her experience with credit card recovery and living within her means.  In the book she assures readers that she knows about financial irresponsibility firsthand. She defines financial irresponsibility in terms of a set of bad habits like “I am near, at, or over the limit on my credit cards,” “I've bounced more than three checks in the past year,” and “I can't imagine living without credit.” Both “I worry about money quite a bit” and “I've never been concerned about money because I have a spouse who takes care of it” are on her list of irresponsible financial habits.

It's as easy to love a rich man as a poor man, and there are rumored to be a few rich men out there who want to take care of all the money and tell their wives not to bother their pretty little heads about it, so why...? Because rich men are mortal, just like poor men, that's why. Hunt's audience included women who wanted to be “traditional,” “submissive,” and “family-focussed,” and were prepared to let their husbands handle the money exactly the way six-year-old children let their parents handle the money, which is fine with Hunt—except that some women outlive their husbands. Women need to be prepared for that too.

While newslettering Hunt also identified a set of “destructive and self-defeating money attitudes”: worshipping money (“The person who worships money is convinced that money...holds the key to a perfect life. She might also believe it is responsible for love, freedom, success, and joy”), depending on money as a mood-altering substance, thinking money measures success, feeling that money buys love, believing money is evil and “to be good you must be poor,” and believing that “the money I have is all I'll ever have,” that one can't earn more. Hunt identified six rules for “the proper management of money”: “1. Give some away. 2. Keep some. 3. It is better not to borrow; but if you cannot avoid it, repay the debt quickly. 4. Do not spend money that doesn't belong to you...”

Hunt ventures into controversial waters on page 85, where she cites a story Jesus apparently told in different ways and versions. The boss gave three working men some money, different amounts according to their abilities. The two smart guys invested the money wisely and proudly showed the boss how they'd doubled the amount given them. The stupid guy, who was given only one “talent of silver” in the beginning, was afraid he'd be blamed for losing money so he just buried that silver in the ground. When the men were called to render an accounting Mr. Sillywimp said something like, “Boss, I know you're a hard, tightfisted man, always taking more than you give. I was afraid of you, so I buried my talent and hid it for you.” (Some say that the allowable translations of what this guy called the boss include “a thief.”) The boss was understandably displeased: “Your own words condemn you, you wicked man. If you knew I was such a hard, tightfisted man,” or even “a thief,” “why didn't you at least give the money to the loan sharks, so I could demand interest on it!” He ordered Mr. Sillywimp to give his one talent to the man who had earned more.

While everyone agrees that Jesus told this story to teach us the values of initiative and enterprise, unfortunately we don't have the sound recording that would have made it clear how sarcastic the boss's suggestion was meant to be. Jesus was speaking primarily to religious Jews who studied the law of Moses. They knew they were legally allowed to lend money at interest to foreigners, subject to foreign laws, but could never charge interest on any loan to a fellow believer. The sound of Jesus' voice undoubtedly made it clear to the audience whether the incident took place in a border or colonized town, where the boss might have been saying “You should have gone out and taken advantage of some foreigners” (not that Jesus necessarily would have agreed with that), or in an insular small town where he might have been saying “If you thought I was as bad as that, and yet you want to work for me, you might as well go all the way into dishonesty and set up as an illegal loan shark!”

What sort of investments did the boss want the three men to make? We'll never know for sure, but as a child in Sunday School I was taught that “investments” meant things like buying seeds to plant, buying tools to use on a job, buying raw material to make into finished products, buying rental property or farmland, or buying things on half-price sales in order to resell them later at three-quarters of the regular retail price. In regular school I learned that “investment” could be stretched to cover things like paying for a training course to qualify you (or your children) for higher-paid jobs. I also learned what “stock market” meant, but I was taught that that, like betting on games or races, was a reckless, foolish misuse of money, not really an investment at all. Hunt uses “investment” to refer to buying stock. She doesn't offer readers inside trading tips, but does retell the urban legend of the man who hated paying his utility bills, decided to get his own back to buying stock in the utility companies, and became wealthy.

She recommends “living beneath your means” by “simplifying” when you can. Wear washable clothes rather than paying for dry-cleaning. Drink tap water rather than pricey bottled drinks. If you've bought things you don't use, sell them. Pay cash rather than paying others to process money for you. Cook from scratch rather than buying convenience food or eating in restaurants. Fix leaky faucets. Set thermostats as low in winter, as high in summer, as they'll go. Write rather than call (and, in 1996, just say no to the Internet—still a good idea if your school dorm doesn't provide, or your employer doesn't set up, free unlimited access). Walk rather than drive. If you're not in the habit of doing little frugal things, you wouldn't believe how much money you can liberate for better uses just by saying no to waste.

If Hunt were to update this book, a chapter might usefully be added on the topic of avoiding wastes of money online...

* Never pay for e-mail, blog, or social media accounts.

* Think twice, even if an employer is paying the full cost, about letting the Internet connect to your home. 

* Never be bullied into “upgrading” to a paid or leased account; always keep corporations aware that the minute the Internet stops being positively profitable to you you'll get out of it.

* Never, never, never post any real-world identity, contact, or credit information, including live pictures, for any living person on any computer. Not only do people who use their real names and pictures online get robbed and cheated; they are handing the enemies of their countries tools for espionage, sabotage, terrorism, and war.

Another way many people could save a lot of money is to minimize the number and length of text messages you exchange. In real life it's actually useful to solicit enough of other people's attention to assess their baseline mood by exchanging a few “hi, how are you” lines before you get to the point. In a real letter it's possible to communicate all kinds of nuances by little tricks like separating lines—e.g. “I hadn't planned to. [ENTER KEY] What price is he asking? [ENTER KEY] What year or model number?” or throwing in surplus words—e.g. “Tracy, I want to see you soon, but I had something else planned this afternoon” instead of “Not today.” In real life, in 1996, most people used land phone lines, on which “local” calls cost nothing, and it was perfectly normal for close friends and family members to call each other whenever they had a spare moment just to show that they were thinking of each other. 

In cyberspace, each of these little mannerisms some of us may be transferring from pre-Internet culture costs money. Not only does it cost you money to “call and just say 'hi'”; it costs your mate, child, or friend money, such that the kind of unnecessary calls, extra words, even little grace-note phrases, that used to be considered “courtesies” are now considered unpardonably rude, bordering on criminal harassment. Frugal people use cell phones almost exclusively to coordinate live conversations!

Hunt offers a short chapter on “getting what you pay for.” Another tip she might include in a new edition would be: Low-risk purchases like used books or printed images are reasonably safe online, if you have a way to make them without using a personal bank card that puts your identity and financial information online. (There's a reason why this web site uses Amazon and Zazzle links. Those products will arrive, or they won't; if it arrives, how disappointing can a used book or a postcard be?) With other things, especially wonderful new gadgets offered by adorable little start-up companies in faraway places, quality control is likely to be spotty. 

I've done a lot of hack writing about products reviewed on Amazon or Walmart.com—a few samples are on this site, most are or once were displayed on the company's site—and although, or perhaps because, most of these products are much cheaper in real-world stores, a continual refrain is “Lack of quality control! Damage in shipping! What was in the package I received was not a thing any real store would have displayed...the little hardware packet was not in the box, the whole object was broken, the box seemed built to hold six objects as advertised but contained only three, the shoes shipped were two different sizes neither of which was the size I ordered, the specialty food was moldy...” Review pages for some products might show hundreds of satisfied customers, but for almost every product on Amazon, somebody seems to have complained that they didn't get the same product that all those people who gave the product high ratings seemed to have received. If you do buy objects more complicated than books and postcards online, in addition to setting up a business identity that's completely separate from your real life and home and family, it seems also to be crucial to be willing to demand satisfaction.

The chapter on getting what you pay for is followed by a slightly longer chapter on planning for retirement: “If you haven't written a will, do it now. If you have one, review it annually.” The chapter even contains a two-page “Ordinary Mortality Table” showing how long readers can expect to live: If you were one year old in 1996, and had an average lifetime ahead of you, you could probably expect another 70 to 75 years; but if you were already 75 years old in 1996, since you'd already outlived several chances to die younger, you'd want to keep saving or earning money to cover an additional 8 to 10 years. (This was in the United States. In some countries the disparities were much greater. In Zambia, if you were one year old in 1996, an “average life expectancy” based on a population where many people die in infancy was 37 to 39 years; if you were already 40 years old in 1996, you were likely to live another 30 years. Average life expectancy figures for Zambia are less appalling now than they used to be, but they still highlight the difference between affluent countries and poor ones.)

The chapter on planning for retirement may be the least realistic one in the book. Hunt wrote based on the assumption that people in their forties and fifties, or even older, could reasonably expect to be hired by corporations as something other than “part-time consultants.” There was no actual law against hiring middle-aged or old people, and hadn't we all seen at least one “faithful janitor” who was still doing his job at 75, at least one “Increasingly Absent-Minded Professor” who answered all suggestions of retirement with the cry that contact with students was keeping her alive? But those of us who considered taking a “second career job” after age forty soon found that that option did not, in practice, exist any more. In 1996 jobs were less scarce than they are now, but they were already scarce enough that only the young were seriously considered. The mere fact that anyone over forty was still filling out forms or sending out resumes was considered a reason not to hire the person. It still is. Many people have no intention of becoming idle or living on old-age pensions, but their alternatives are, for all practical purposes, limited to self-employment. We've become a country where White women in nice houses welfare-cheat for the same reasons their young-adult children get involved in drugs or prostitution.

The book ends with a plan of action, in which Hunt suggests journaling, keeping spending records, abstaining from incurring new debts, and setting up a plan for getting out of debt. Back matter includes a bibliography, lists of state “Consumer Protection” offices, and a glossary of financial terms.

This book could be a useful tool for some women, even for some women's groups. I would warn that not only Jewish or Muslim, but even some Christian groups might want to agree to ignore the assertion that Jesus recommended lending money at interest, due to the controversy about whether He positively recommended that at all. However, not only churches, but also sororities and social clubs, can benefit from positively addressing debt as an addiction. Women's groups can be a nice place for women to get acquainted and make sure they're agreeing to pool resources like printers, washing machines, or TV sets with, er um, allrightniks. People who use your laundry room don't have to become your intimate friends but it can be a good idea to meet them socially and confirm that they're not going to be smoking in there, that if they offer a service like dog grooming in return they're not going to dope your dog. A book group studying The Financially Confident Woman would be an ideal place to find compatible resource-poolers.

What I physically own, and will be displaying for resale, is a first edition of The Financially Confident Woman. I didn't know before writing this review that revised editions exist; considering the extent to which Internet culture and demographic shifts have changed the financial atmosphere during the past 23 years, those revised editions certainly needed to be printed and will almost certainly be more valuable to readers new to this subject than the first edition is. Buy the 2015 edition as a new book, if you can, for your own benefit as well as to encourage Mary Hunt. 

If, however, you want the 1996 edition for comparison or collection purposes, you may buy it here as a Fair Trade Book, on our usual terms: $5 per book, $5 per package, $1 per online payment, and six or eight books of this size will fit into one $5 package.