One way to set the balance is to estimate your weekly expenses and then try and stay within your estimate. In other words, if your estimate says one movie a week (and that's all you can afford), don't go to a second or you will be certain to run short. Another trick is to save up toward splurges. Put aside a certain amount each week, which later you can spend in one glorious plunge for something you could ordinarily not afford.
One of the most mortal wounds to any budget is to borrow against it with the firm intention of paying it back. You never do. If you can't afford to buy something, don't. If you feel that you really must have whatever it is, then earn extra money, do not borrow, either from your family or from yourself. As I pointed out before, there are easy ways to get quick cash, so you need never complain that you didn't have any other way out.
Sometimes teens want money in sums far larger than those for weekly movies, formal gowns and the like. Some teens need money to pay their way to school or college. It is possible to earn that money if you really keep your nose to the grindstone. Summer jobs become essential—and such jobs as camp counseling are excellent because while you earn you are living free. Your salary is almost net profit.
In fact, any summer job which pays you a salary at the same time that it provides room and board is a sure-fire scheme. In addition to counseling, jobs at summer resorts and hotels, like waiting on table, are highly desirable. If you are interested in this kind of thing make your plans well in advance. You cannot expect to find these positions at the last minute.
There is yet another approach to the art of having enough money, and that is cutting down on expenses—or in the plain parlance of platitudes, "A penny saved is a penny earned." Girls who sew their own clothes will know that for every dress they make instead of buying they have saved and thereby earned a sizable hunk of cash.
Other ways of saving are to ride a bike instead of the bus, write letters instead of making long distance telephone calls, and stay at home and play records instead of feeling obliged to see every movie that comes to town.
A way of saving that will repay you in other ways than cash in the bank is the curtailment of eating snacks between meals. With this method, five cents saved on a candy bar will also be 100 calories saved from settling on your hipline. If you get in the habit of putting in a piggy bank the money that you might have spent on snacks, bus fares, telephone calls, etc., you will be pleasantly surprised to see that at the end of a month you will have earned yourself quite a merry jingle, the sum total of which may amaze you.
It is always easier to save when you are saving with something specific in mind—like saving for a new bike, for a birthday gift for Mother, for Christmas gifts for the family, for a new anything. It is harder to save just for the sake of saving, but that latter method is a good habit to try and adopt. Try and train yourself to put away mechanically so much each week, to forget in fact that you ever had the money in the first place. Don't even think about it, let it remain in a savings account and grow fat, fatter, fattest, until the day when you really need it for something stupendous.
All in all there is really no reason ever to despair, in this land of ours, for lack of money. If you want a thing strongly enough, you can nearly always find a way to get it. Envy won't produce it, of course, but hard work will—and hard work that can be fun at the same time. No job need seem laborious if you go at it with the intention of having fun. Even mowing lawns can be fun, if you sing at your work—and remember, if you are on a lawn-mowing tour of duty, that you are giving yourself a healthy workout that will put zing in your step and slim down your figure.
As a matter of fact, any work that you do, from clerking in a store to washing dishes for Mother, will not only earn you extra cents but will also teach you new facets of life. It will enlarge your horizons, force you to learn patience and perseverance, and better prepare you for the day when you doff the cap and gown and set foot in your own world.
If the lack of a few pennies sets you off to earn your own money, then instead of feeling sorry for yourself you can count yourself lucky, for you are getting your licks in early. There is not one friend of my acquaintance who regrets the time she spent in her school days earning extra money. In fact many of them look to that period as the time when they first learned what stuff life—not dreams—is made of.
Remember that if you have to take a job when you are still in your teens, you may be establishing your career. I never forget that the reason I became a model was because I needed to earn money for my college tuition.
It is not often that a girl can step right into modeling as a money-making sideline when she is still in school. I was fortunate in that I lived near New York, which is a center of fashion and consequently a place where models are much in demand. It is not often, either, that a girl, having graduated from school, can come to New York, or any other city, and become a success as a model. For every thousand girls who try, I am told, only one succeeds.
It is a strange combination of talents that makes a girl a successful model—a good figure, a photogenic face (one that has interesting planes and angles more than rounded sweetness), an alert air, a great deal of intelligence, and a keen understanding of fashion. Even with all these qualifications, sometimes a girl just doesn't click. The fashion world is fickle.
Because so many teens have asked me how to be a model and what modeling involves, 111 try to sum up the requirements here. For the most part what I have to say will be discouraging. I don't mean to sound hardhearted, but the facts are very bleak.
First, you've got to be ready to work hard. You've got to be prepared to take a lot of hard knocks. I know one young model who has been trying to get established for a year. She is still trying. Recently she told me that she had advised her younger sister, who was thinking of trying her hand also, that the game wasn't worth the candle.
Second, you will need enough money to see you through six months—for in the beginning, jobs, if any, will be few and far between. If at the end of six months you are still ringing magazine and photographers' doorbells without success, if you have not been taken on by a store or showroom as a regular, then salvage what is left of your nest egg and turn your thoughts to other things. You just weren't cut out to be a model.
As to modeling itself, it is not all made up of posing glamor-ously for magazines. Many models never even see a camera. These are the girls who work in stores and showrooms (where wholesale dresses are made). They model dresses for prospective buyers. Their life is a round of getting into and out of dresses. They have the advantage, however, of steady work and steady pay. Furthermore, they have the excitement of being in at the beginning of new fashions, for it is in the wholesale showroom (in New York, in Chicago, in St. Louis, in California) where the fashion ideas are born. There the department store people come to buy the clothes you see on the racks. There also come the fashion editors of magazines and newspapers to choose the things they want to photograph and which ultimately you see pictured on their pages.
In addition to showroom models, there are girls who model for department stores—in the expensive salons. These girls are hired on a steady basis, as the wholesale girls are. There are also girls who model for fashion shows, such as stores give from time to time; these girls are not steady employees, but free-lancers. They may do only shows, or they may mix shows with photography.