The Jacobses decided last year that storm windows and a fireplace would be an investment, not a luxury. The payments on this investment now come to $20, due the first of every month. Payments on their 1957 car, which was remortgaged to help pay for the house, are $37 a month, and their revolving budget accounts at Sears and Montgomery Ward are $31 a month. This completes the hell-or-high-water commitments that must be met every month-leaving only $70 from Dave's paycheck. Since it costs Betty $92 a month for food and running the house, the Jacobses would theoretically starve if it were not for Betty's side income.
Living it up on a minus figure; $542 = $511
Five days a week, earning a total of $15, Betty takes care of two young boys whose parents work at Franklin Electric. That extra $63 a month added to the $70 left over from Dave's check enables them to pay the household expenses and still have $41 for whooping it up.
But before any particular whooping can be done, there are a few little odds and ends, the items that would break the Jacobses' budget-if they had one. There are clothes and cleaning, the $1-a-week ballet lessons for their 5-year-old daughter Cindy, an occasional golf game for Dave, hair cuts, permanent waves, grass seed and fertilizer, doctors' bills, church donations, a movie now and then, a newspaper every day. Month in, month out, the odds and ends average $72-$31 more than exist. In short, the Jacobses must live with a permanent deficit in their balance of payments.
Although a monthly $31 deficit might disconcert many economists and practically all members of the older generation, Dave and Betty are actually a good deal better off today then they have been in the past.
When they were married in 1956, Dave was an apprentice draftsman and Betty was working in an advertising office in Fort Wayne, Ind. "Boy, we were in great shape," Dave remembers. "I was making $66 before taxes and we didn't have a nickel in our pockets or a stick of furniture. In fact, we were starting off $1,500 in hock for a new Studebaker I'd bought the year before."
Betty had always dreamed of a big wedding, so they had a big wedding, paying for everything themselves except for two hams and two kegs of beer provided by her parents. Betty's wedding dress was picked up at a fire sale for $45. All the money they could lay their hands on went for the big day, leaving just enough for a one-day honeymoon in a motel. The following morning they moved into their furnished apartment in Fort Wayne.
Betty was bringing in $40 a week from her job and they figured that in perhaps two years they could afford to have children. Cindy came along in 10 months. Not only did Betty have to give up her job, but a whole new set of expenses popped up: furniture, a washer and dryer, a move to Bluffton so that Dave could be closer to his job.
The period when Betty was pregnant with Cindy was a difficult test for the Jacobses. Even their special efforts to economize seemed predestined to fail. "That was about the time," says Dave, " that Betty decided to cut my hair. A neighbor had one of those clippers you make a butch cut with. The top went just fine, but Betty couldn't figure out how to do the back."
Still blushing today when she remembers it, Betty says, "I took one swoop and there was this big white spot. I took another swoop and then I broke down and started bawling. I shoved him into his coat, turned up the collar and sent him down to the barber. I couldn't say anything, I was crying so hard. We decided we couldn't save any money that way."
During Betty's first pregnancy they had one of their few battles over how to spend. "We saved up some stamp books," she says, "and we thought we were rich when we went into that store. But Dave, he wanted an electric sander, and I had my heart set on something else. We must have argued in there for two hours. Know what we came out with? A tricycle. I didn't have Cindy for another half a year, and then we had to keep that crazy bike in a box for three more years until she was big enough t use it."
Costly lesson in the "hard sell"
But in spite of Cindy's arrival and all the expenses she entailed, Dave and Betty managed to approach solvency by the fall of 1957. The furniture was paid for and was only just beginning to wear out. Dave's major worry was the Studebaker, which was still $700 short of being paid for but was already making noises that sounded like $200 worth of repairs. One quiet evening they drove up to Fort Wayne. "We just wanted to take a good look around," Dave says, "We wanted to get an idea what our car was worth so I'd know how much we ought to put into it." Two hours later, after a graduate course in the hard sell, Dave and Betty walked out of the showroom, "owning" a brand-new Chevorlet.
"We've developed some sales resistance since then," Dave claims.
Five years in Bluffton have brought to the Jacobses a second daughter, Sherri, now 3, and several raises for Dave that have lifted his hourly pay to $2.56. The years have also brought an outdoor lamp pole and a charcoal grill to their 7-room prefab house.
"This is our only vice," says Dave, waving at the house and grounds.
The Jacobs house looks much like all the other houses on Columbian Road, five minutes drive from Dave's job. Nobody has much dog to put on; entertainment is a neighborhood affair. Summer cook-outs may take place at the Jacobses because they have a patio and grill, but a neighbor brings the chicken.