Another kind of activity that can be turned to profit is cooking. If you know your way around a kitchen, you could try and set up a junior catering service. Offer your wares to friends in the neighborhood who you know to be planning parties. This is a good summer job, because you have time to do a thorough piece of work and are also free to take on an emergency call. Canvass your block and notify everyone that you will make cakes, cookies, hot rolls, etc., for any parties they are planning. You might also agree to undertake children's parties, doing everything from preparing the cookies and ice cream to making up the games and favors.
Even if you don't cook, other people's parties can be turned to your profit if you offer your services as a helper. You could serve the refreshments, tidy up the house in advance, and clean up afterwards. A few such sessions with mop and dishcloth will enable you to buy that dreamy dress you've long been coveting.
Come summer, you have the time to try out all these schemes. Don't be bashful about starting out. Advertise yourself, ring doorbells, and get going full steam ahead. The idea is to undertake as much as you can, but still have free time to
Play-Summer is perhaps the most valuable job time available. It is the time when you can experiment, feel your oats in the business world. Any teen who has a glimmer of what she wants to do when she gets out of school should certainly try to gain experience in that field some summer before the day of cap and gown. If you yearn to write, go down to the local newspaper and see if they need a copy girl. If you yearn to be a fashion girl, try to get a selling job at the local store (selling experience is one of the surest ways to get ahead in fashion). If you yearn to decorate, see what odd jobs the interior decorator has—remember nothing is too lowly. The way to gain experience is to go out and get it.
Sometimes it is not just an individual who is out of funds; sometimes a whole group, a club or an organization, is down to its collective last dollar. When the exchequer hits bottom with a thud, don't throw up your hands in despair. Instead start figuring out how you can revive the treasury.
Groups can do much to raise money because they have more than one pair of hands to help. What about a raffle, and why not raffle off Argyle socks made by your own loving
Groups can do much to raise money because they have more than one pair of hands to help. What about a raffle, and why not raffle off Argyle socks made by your own loving hands? Why not raffle of! an afghan, with each girl making one square? Why not give a white elephant sale with each member donating some one of her treasures—stuffed animals, old but still useful clothes, etc.?
One of the most enjoyable ways to raise money is to give a party (and charge admission)—but it is also one of the most difficult. In the first place, a party needs money to start off with—money for refreshments, decorations and music (if only records). Perhaps the way to surmount this problem is to have each member of the group contribute—crepe paper from one, one dozen lemons from another, cookies from another, and so on until the list is complete.
One sure way to make a party a success is to invite everyone you know. The more the merrier is a true saying—and furthermore, the more that come, the more admission fees you have to tuck away in the till. Another success tip is give yourself time to do the job properly and also time in which to give out advance publicity on your plans. Get others excited about what you are proposing to do and they all will come flocking from curiosity.
An unpleasant subject that I am forced to introduce at this point is that often the lack of cold cash is due to mismanagement of funds at hand, otherwise known as poor budgeting. One of the facts of life that must be faced is that money must be handled with sense.
Whether you are on an allowance, whether you earn your own, or whether you come to Mother each time you need cash, you should all know how to budget your money. Budgeting is not mysterious; it is a simple matter of balancing what comes in against what goes out.
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.