By Tim Sanders

A recent study by J. G. Wentworth showed that 98.7% of people with structured settlements–people who periodically stick their heads out their windows and scream "IT’S MY MONEY, AND I NEED IT NOW!" at the top of their lungs–are eventually dragged from their homes and beaten senseless by their neighbors.
We applaud that research, and those neighbors.

The same study also showed that women, by and large, do not deal with financial issues the same way men do. I know that this is true because my wife is a woman, and has been one for her entire married life. She has always had her own special way of dealing with numbers. In years past, for example, we’ve had a couple of intense discussions about our checking account balance. Those discussions involved negative numbers. What happened was, we had failed to record a deposit, which gave our checkbook a balance a few hundred dollars less than what was showing on our bank statement. Those conversations, with Marilyn and me seated at the kitchen table in full accountant mode, are seared into my memory. They went something like this:

ME: "We need to find the difference between the bank’s figures and ours, and that will give us an idea of where we went wrong. Take $652.40 and deduct a negative $13.10."

MARILYN (fiddling with calculator): "Okay ... that would be $639.30."

ME: "No, the difference should be greater than $652.40. You deducted a positive $13.10, not a negative $13.10."

MARILYN: "What in the world are you talking about?"

ME: "Deducting a negative number from a positive number is like adding that number to the positive number, dear."

MARILYN: "What is a negative number?"

ME: "Look, it’s very simple. If you subtract 5 from 3, you wind up with a negative 2."

MARILYN: "You can’t subtract 5 from 3. It’s against all the rules of math. Any fool knows that!"

ME: "Yes you can. What you get is a minus, or negative, 2."

MARILYN: "Now wait a minute. Let’s use apples. If you have three apples, you can’t give away five of them, can you?"

ME: "No ... but–"

MARILYN: "Even you can see how silly that would be! Let’s say you had an apple stand, and all you had left were three apples. And then let’s say a customer asked for five apples, and you told him you could sell him three positive apples and two negative apples. He’d laugh in your face. And even if you had two negative apples, where would you keep them? In a negative apple crate which was invisible because somebody had stolen it from you a year ago? HAH!"

I would persist for awhile, but eventually she’d wear me down, until all I could do was agree that I was wrong, and there was really no such thing as a negative number. I’d then suggest that she add a positive $13.10 to the $652.40. She’d tell me she knew I’d come to my sense eventually, we’d arrive at a figure we could agree on, and harmony would return to the Sanders household.

Just last week Marilyn came up with a serious, substantive strategy to make a great deal of money in these difficult economic times.

"I have a plan here that could earn us several thousand dollars a year," she said. "I’ve done all the math, and written it down on this piece of paper."

Of course I had to ask. "What would that plan be, dear?"

"Well," she said, "it all would depend on Congress passing that gas tax holiday that John McCain and Hillary Clinton are proposing."

"Okay," I said, "let’s assume that they pass the bill."

"Well then," she said, "that would mean that we’d all save 18.4 cents a gallon on gasoline, right?"

"Right."

"So on the news yesterday they said that the people who would save the most money would be long distance truckers, with low gas mileage vehicles, right?"
"Well, I suppose so, but what–"

"Just wait, I’ve figured it all out. If we continue driving around town in our little van or the pickup truck, which are both pretty good on gas, we won’t save much, will we?"

"No, but–"

"What we’d save, even if we used 50 gallons of gas a month, would only work out to $9.20 a month, or $110.40 a year. I worked it all out on the calculator, and that’s about the best we can do. We can’t save any meaningful gas tax money driving piddly little vehicles like that for short distances, can we?"

"Well, no, but on the other hand–"

"So here’s my plan. If we were to get a really big, heavy 50 ft. motor home with all the trimmings, one that only got about 5 miles per gallon on the highway, we’d be set to save some real money. Why if we could–"

"Hold on," I said. "If we’re putting all of that gas into–"

"Just pay attention. Franklin D. Roosevelt said a penny saved is a penny earned, and obviously the more gas you use, the more tax holiday pennies you save, right?"

"Strictly speaking, yes, but I think you’re confusing FDR with Benjamin Frank–"

"There you go, changing the subject again! Now pay attention! If we put 100,000 miles a year on that big motor home, we’d use 20,000 gallons of gas, which at a savings of 18.4 cents per gallon would amount to ... let me see here ... $306.66 per month, or $3,680 a year. And with that extra $3,680 we could buy 920 gallons of gas at $4 per gallon, which would more than pay for a trip to California and back. And if we could manage to put 200,000 miles a year on the RV, in just 20 years we’d have saved enough to pay for the thing! You’ve got to admit that driving across the country in a nice, comfortable RV would certainly be preferable to ripping downtown and back in that stupid pickup truck fifty or sixty times a day in order to earn that extra gas tax money."

At this point I could feel a headache coming on. "I think there are some things you forgot to factor in," I said. "There’s a certain lack of logic to your–"

"Well, if you’re going to be unreasonable and bring up negative numbers and all of that foolishness, there’s no sense in discussing this any further."

I believe that she could have had a successful career in politics, had she only started earlier.