The Penny Pinchers Club

by Sarah Strohmeyer

  The group went silent. At first, I thought they might have been in awe, considering how tough it is to quit Starbs. But then I realized otherwise—they were in shock.

  Wade leaned forward and grinned as if he could see right through me. “Was I correct in remembering that you pay Libby a hundred bucks a week to clean your house?”

  The room got very hot. Sherise fiddled with her pearls, and Opal went back to sorting the coupons.

  “That’s right. I have for fifteen years.”

  “And was that your SUV parked outside, the Lexus?”

  Steve let out a whistle. “Those things go for what, forty, fifty grand?”

  “It’s a 2002,” I said defensively. “And I got a good deal. Why, is there something wrong with me driving a Lexus?”

  “Not at all.” Wade threw up his hands. “Just raises the question of why a woman with a housekeeper and a luxury vehicle would see the need to join this group. I mean, we’re hardly in your income bracket. Look at me. I don’t even have an income.”

  Ah, so that explained why Wade was such a jerk. He must have lost his job. Men take unemployment so hard.

  “I’m sure you’ll find work soon.” Then, remembering a phrase I’d heard Chloe use often, I said, “Besides, the economy will turn around any day now.”

  “Thank you, Pollyanna.” He massaged his forehead. “You’re not getting it. I quit my job. I used to make over a million dollars on Wall Street and drive a Porsche.”

  Steve said, “Now he lives in his mother’s backyard. In a tent.”

  “Yurt.” Wade sat back and crossed his arms. “It’s a yurt, man.”

  Libby whispered, “No one’s calling it a tent, babe. Steve just misspoke.”

  “Hmph.” Steve flexed his bicep that sported a tattoo—Bunny—surrounded by a heart. “I’ll call it a tent if it’s a tent.”

  Tensions were rising, and I couldn’t help feeling that, somehow, I’d been the one at fault. Sherise, eager to keep order, inched forward on her chair. “You know, Kat. You might want to examine if a group setting is the best situation for you right now. Have you thought of going online? There are hundreds of sites on frugal living to get you started.”

  “For those of you who have computers,” Opal added. “Personally, I wouldn’t allow one in the house. All that free porn?” She tapped her temple. “Screws with teenagers’ minds.”

  Sherise shot her a warning glance. “What I mean is, you might get more information that way and not waste time listening to us bicker.”

  No one dared make eye contact. Even Libby, who’d been begging me for years to come, pretended to be fascinated by the heel of her new boots. The exact same thing happened in a step aerobics class once when, after repeatedly falling behind and tripping and being out of sync, the aerobics instructor came over and said I might feel more comfortable in a beginner class because everyone else was used to a faster pace and she didn’t want to have to slow them down to help me. They wanted to get rid of me.

  No. No. No. They could not kick me out. This was my only chance to get on the right track. If I couldn’t work with a group, I’d be completely without support. I didn’t want to find help on Griff’s computer alone, with those emails of his only a keystroke away.

  “The thing is,” I began, tamping down feelings of growing desperation, “I need this group because, I know this sounds weird, but . . . my husband’s leaving me.”

  It just came out. Even I was stunned. I don’t think I’d ever before said those words—my husband’s leaving me—out loud.

  Libby hissed, “Kat?”

  Too late now. Better to plow on. “Last month, the day of our twentieth wedding anniversary, I found a couple of emails to his assistant. He’s set up a private bank account, put $10,000 of our money into it, and has even taken out a new credit card in his name only so he can buy her dinners and hotel rooms and whatever.”

  The backs of my eyes began to throb. Since my cry in the master bath, I’d been holding in all these emotions and now they threatened to burst—in front of these strangers! People who for all intents and purposes didn’t like me very much. People who’d written me off as a pampered suburban housewife with a luxury car and Tod’s drivers.

  “But I have no money of my own. None. So if I don’t start saving now, I won’t have anything when my husband walks out the door after our daughter graduates from high school this June.”

  Opal walked over to me on her knees. “He’s going to leave you in June?”

  “That’s what the email said.” I could barely blubber out the next line. “That is . . . if he can put up with me that long.”

  “Oh, oh.” She got up and, pushing Steve off his own seat, brought me to her, placing my head on her nice warm chest that smelled vaguely of lavender and yeast. “You should have told us right off.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Sherise said. “Is there anything we can do?”

  “Yeah,” Libby said. “We can stop being a bunch of reverse snobs and help this woman. She’s a friend of mine and she’s in pain.”

  It was so true! I choked back a sob and Opal handed me a dingy handkerchief. No bleach.

  Velma put down her knitting. “I’m not very familiar with how much it costs to get a divorce nowadays, having been left by my own husband thirty years ago when he walked out to get a quart of milk and never came back.”

  Wade said, “Here we go. The weekly male smackdown. Is it possible for us to go a month without one?”

  “So,” she went on, “how much, exactly, do you need to save?”

  I didn’t want to say, not with people like Wade who intentionally didn’t earn a living. But Steve said, “Remember. You gotta be up front with us, Kat. It’s part of the program.”

  Opal pushed back my hair, her voice warm and motherly. “The beauty is, once you tell us, then it becomes our problem, too, not just yours. That’s what we’re all about at the Penny Pinchers: overcoming financial anxiety with communal support and savings strategies.”

  What a lovely idea! Why, if I had other people to share this with, then I wouldn’t have to lie awake at night thinking about it. I could pretend they were lying awake with me.

  I hiccupped. “Fifteen thousand.”

  Velma said, “Oh, my. That’s more than I live on in a year.”

  “Chump change.” Wade flipped his wrist. “I used to spend $15,000 on a weekend in the Hamptons and never miss it.”

  “Well, la-di-da, Mr. Rothschild,” Opal scolded. “We’re not talking about you and your former life as a Wall Street playboy, are we? We’re talking about Kat.” She went back to stroking my hair. “Now, be honest, hon. How much do you have saved already and don’t exaggerate. That won’t help a bit.”

  I pinched my thumb and forefinger together to make a zero, a symbol that should be etched on my tombstone.

  “Zero?” Opal pulled away. “As in nothing?”

  “Zip, zilch, nada.”

  We sat there, flummoxed, until Libby said, “Truth is, she doesn’t know how much she has.”

  “Of course she knows how much money she has,” Sherise said. “Unless she was like me, with a trust fund and Daddy’s accountants handling everything.”

  “No accountants,” Libby said. “She’s just clueless. I was at her house when her sister and her friend were going over her finances and looking for evidence that her husband was cheating and I could overhear them. With all due respect, Kat”—she gave me a dutiful nod—“you’re a financial idiot.”

  It was a shocking statement, albeit an honest one.

  “Is that true?” Sherise asked.

  “Pretty much.”

  “That I don’t get,” Steve said. “I’m raising two kids on my own and if I didn’t know how much money I had in my wallet, those suckers would rob me blind.”

  I tried explaining it this way: “You know how some people have a fear of heights or spiders? I have a fear of bills. They should come up with a name for it,Visaphobia or something.”

  No one
laughed.

  “Then it’s obvious,” Opal said, turning to the group. “This calls for an immediate Penny Pinchers audit.” Setting me right in my seat, she went to the coupon pile and fetched her clear plastic accordion file. “We’ll follow you, Kat. I take it from Libby you don’t live far.”

  Steve checked his watch. “I gotta be at work in a couple of hours, so we have to make it snappy.”

  “Count me out,” Wade said. “The suburbs make me nervous.”

  Libby let out a little moan in disappointment.

  Hold on. Hold on. Were they about to do what I thought they were about to do? Was this the end of the meeting or . . . were they really going to come to my house and go through my records?

  Velma said,“Do you have coffee, Kat? Because I made a delightful lemon coffee cake for the meeting that I’ll just take to your place.”

  Oh, my God. They were going to go to my house!

  “Excuse me!” I raised my hand tentatively. “This is really wonderful of you and all, but . . .”

  Sherise, buttoning up a smart fire engine red coat that I could have sworn was Valentino, said, “But what?”

  “But I can’t let you go through my personal stuff.”

  “Why not?” Steve asked. “We did the same thing for Sherise when she showed up a few years ago like you.”

  Sherise agreed. “That’s right. And now I run the group.”

  “What’s the matter?” Steve folded his arms. “Don’t you trust us?”

  “I do . . . it’s just that, I’m not sure—no, wait—I know my husband would have a fit if he found out I let total strangers comb through our files.”

  They stared as if I’d had the audacity to object.

  “Your husband?” Velma flipped him the bird with one of her knitting needles. “His vote stopped counting when he decided to cheat on you.”

  “And I, for one, am slightly offended you consider me a stranger after fifteen years of scrubbing your toilets,” Libby said. “That Adele on the other hand? Now she was strange.”

  “Besides, you gotta bite the bullet and find out what your situation is,” Sherise said. “Otherwise, how do you know where to go if you don’t know where you are?”

  CHAPTER TEN

  “When the Penny Pinchers do an audit, they don’t stop at adding up your income and debt. Oh, no. They check out everything until there’s nothing about you they don’t know.”

  This was Sherise’s warning as we drove from the Rocky River Public Library to my house. Of course, the Penny Pinchers carpooled, which was why she was in my passenger seat explaining not only how the group operated but how she came to seek their help years before.

  It was the idea of her father, a wealthy investment banker who’d spoiled her rotten, after he read an item in the Rocky River Public Library newsletter about a group of frugal-minded people who wanted to start up a club devoted to trading coupons and tips on savings.

  Back then, he and Sherise were barely on speaking terms, so disgusted was he by her careless disregard for his hard-earned money, putting clothes, shoes, trips, and even nights on the town for her friends on his credit cards. The Penny Pinchers was a last resort.

  “I was, like, what did I do wrong? You were the one who sent me to boarding school and college without so much as mentioning tuition. You were the one who gave me the charge cards and never made me look at a bill. How was I supposed to know that stuff costs money?”

  It was a sort of childish question and, yet, I understood it fully. If her father hadn’t wanted her to rack up huge bills, then he shouldn’t have made it so easy. Kind of strange how parents can talk about drugs and sex with their kids, but when it comes to money, they clam up. Griff and I were no exception. Laura had no concept how much—or how little—we made, and that was just the way we liked it.

  I waited at the front of our development for Opal, who was hauling the rest of the group—Steve,Velma, and Libby, Wade having thumbed a ride back into Princeton—in her minivan. He was, Libby said with much reluctance, “adorably antisocial.”

  Sherise went on. “Then one day I came home from college and was ambushed by my parents. All the bills were laid out on the kitchen table and my father said, ‘Sherise. You have to get control.’ I thought he was talking about something else to buy. I said, ‘What’s control?’”

  Opal pulled up behind me, flashed her headlights, and I took a left, snaking our way through the roads of Waldorf Farms until we got to our modest blue colonial with its basketball hoop and lone elm in the tiny front yard.

  “And here I am, years later, a financial adviser with a five-year investment plan and an IRA.” She unsnapped her seat belt. “Ask me how much I have already saved for retirement.”

  “How much?”

  “Twenty-five thousand, six hundred dollars and I’m only twenty-six. Now that’s what you call control.”

  Steve helped Velma out of the minivan while Libby, acting as though this were her house, took the liberty of leading Opal inside, lifting up the front mat and helping herself to my spare key. “This way, people. Wipe your feet.”

  Velma said, “What about the killer dog you were telling us about in the car?”

  There was a halfhearted bark from Jasper in the garage. “He won’t bother you. He’s ancient, anyway.” Libby unlocked the door.

  What happened to her threat to pepper spray? Suddenly my vicious dog was ancient?

  Velma passed in front of me carrying her foil-covered coffee cake like I was invisible.

  “Libby tells me you got three TVs.” Steve scratched his head. “Oh, man. I don’t even know where to begin. You gotta jettison two, at least, though it’s better not to have even one. Those shows like Gossip Girl send kids the wrong messages. Makes them think they’re entitled to be driven to school in limousines and drink and do drugs and such.”

  I studied his crew cut and the chain hooked through his faded jeans and thought it somewhat astounding that a muscled rent-a-cop like him had even heard of Gossip Girl.

  “See? I told you they just take over.” Sherise pulled tight her lovely red coat against a breeze through the elm. “My advice is to relax and let them do it. They live for this. It’s their raison d’être.”

  I tried to relax, but it wasn’t easy with Libby acting as tour guide, pointing out my most egregious possessions. The PS3 we used to play Blu-ray movies, for example, was not only a pricey toy, but also a huge energy sucker. Steve found a button in the back and snapped it off. “Saved you a dollar a day right there.”

  Meanwhile, in the kitchen, Opal was taking an inventory of my food, noting with dismay the tubs of prepared pesto in my refrigerator, wrapped cold cuts, and, yes, collection of boxed cereals. “Don’t you know anything that comes in a box is a rip-off and probably loaded with carcinogenic preservatives?” She tossed a box over her shoulder. “Get yourself some glass jars at the Dollar Store and fill them with pasta, rice, and homemade granola from the bins at the co-op. Maybe some oatmeal and raisins, too. Organic, of course.”

  I said, “Of course,” knowing full well that in a million years I would never trot down to the Dollar Store for glass containers, that I would never take the time to fill them up with staples from the Whole Foods store in Princeton.

  “Do you have a downstairs freezer?” She held open the cabinet doors with both hands.

  I shook my head no.

  “That’s your next purchase. It’ll pay for itself in the long run.” She quit the cabinet to assess what I had under the kitchen sink. According to her, I didn’t need most of the chemicals there except for dishwasher detergent and ammonia. “Most everything can be cleaned easily and, more important, safely, with vinegar and baking soda.” She pinched a bottle of mildew remover as though it were nuclear waste. “Overpriced and causes asthma. Throw it away.”

  Velma was at the top of the stairs to the basement, a slice of coffee cake on a napkin, a cup of coffee in her hand. Did someone make coffee? “Is this where she keeps her records, Libby?” />
  Libby, pouring herself a cup, said, “Yup. Griff’s got a Quicken program. That should be a start.”

  “Libby!” Not even I, his wife, knew Griff had a Quicken program. How did she? “That’s going too far.”

  “What? It’s Velma and Sherise. Not like they’re gonna hack into your bank account.” She sipped her coffee. “Not like there’d be any money in there if they did.”

  With everyone preoccupied, now was my chance to grill her about the man she’d been hiding. “So what’s up with you and Wade?” I asked, getting my own cup of coffee.

  Libby shrugged, like it was no big deal. “He’s a friend. That’s all.”

  “Yeah? Well, I have lots of friends and none of them nuzzles my neck like he was doing.”

  “Okay, so we’re kinda hot and heavy.” She dipped her finger in the coffee coquettishly, giving it a slight twirl. “I haven’t exactly been singing it from the rooftops because we’re taking it slowly, on Wade’s advice. He’s been kind of burned in the past and, you know, he wants to make sure we’re on solid footing before we go public.”

  That old line, I thought as Steve came down the stairs two at a time to announce he’d found the TV in our bedroom for a total of eight phantom appliances.

  “You were in our bedroom?” I couldn’t get over his audacity. I mean, I had clothes lying about. My bra!

  “Yes, ma’am. And let me tell you that you put that bedroom TV and the DVD player on a power strip along with most of your other appliances like your microwave, you’ll cut your energy bill sixty percent if you flick off those strips for twelve hours every night.” He did not think it the least bit rude that he’d tromped into my personal space without my permission. “Now, about that water heater. . . .”

  I led him down to the basement and showed him the heater room. He went over to our ancient white model, patted it, and said, “Handyman’s special, this is. Your bills must be huge.”