Keep this statement somewhere, either in the back of your account book or in a blank book kept for the purpose, so that you can always tell at a glance how much you have spent any month on any one item. This memorandum is very important and should be a great help to you, for, after several months of careful watching you will begin to know about how much you really need for your different regular expenses. Sometimes, after looking over the figures, you are led to feel that you have spent more than you ought on some one account, sometimes on another, and then the accounts have to be gone over to see how you have been careless. Even now I find it of use to look back on this memorandum when money seems to be going a little faster than it ought to. Each family has to decide for itself what _proportion_ should be allowed for these different expenses, but, with your income of $2200 a year, it is safe to allow fifty cents a day per person for all food. The house rent, so business men say, should not be more than a quarter of one’s income, if possible a little less than that. Neither of you will feel happy, I know, unless you lay aside something for your church interests and also to help, if only a very little, some of the public-spirited efforts for good. You can’t improve on the Biblical proportion of a tenth of one’s income for this, or more if you are prosperous. Some people could get almost that from the waste in their households. You can see how you could enjoy giving when you knew just what you had to give and were not worried with indecision. Above all things, be very frank with each other in money affairs. Lack of this frankness is sometimes responsible for a man’s getting into debt because he can’t bear to deny his wife what she wants and she doesn’t know that he is living beyond his means to get it for her. I hope you won’t think me cruel when I advise you to keep away from shops unless you have something to buy; in fact, waiting until you have quite a list, for if one doesn’t see the fascinating things one doesn’t feel the need of them. Bargains are a snare and a delusion, and, depend upon it, one spends less money by getting something at its regular price when one actually needs it than in getting something very cheap to lay by for a possible need which may never come. I can understand your feeling perfectly well that economy seems so mean, but all danger of its being mean is removed if you waste nothing on yourselves or your household in order to be able to do something better or wiser or more generous with your money. We have nothing but admiration of the French thrift (we don’t call it economy), and why should not we Americans follow their example?