Love Is Not Enough: A Smart Woman’s Guide to Money. Merryn Webb Somerset

are, after all, men.

      Scams: the ways you won’t make money

      When you need money badly it’s tempting to fall for one of the many get-rich-quick schemes about, particularly as so many of them sound so very plausible. But like most things when it comes to money, dealing with scams is a matter of common sense. All you have to do is remember this: when it comes to money, when something sounds too good to be true it always is. There are no exceptions.

       The Avon Lady and Ebay: Selling in your spare time

      I remember the Avon Lady coming round when I was a little girl. She had cases and cases full of wonderful coloured smelly goodies and my mother, after a good rummage through and a bit of a gossip, would occasionally buy a lipstick or two from her. But who would have thought that in today’s Internet age the Avon Lady would still exist? Well, amazingly she does. Christianne Randolfi became an Avon Lady by default. She used and wanted to keep using the products (Avon aren’t just about lipstick these days – you can buy anything from foundation to knickers to jewellery from your local representative) so she signed herself up as a sales rep. Now she sells to her friends and local acquaintances in a small way, putting in an order for around £70 and making roughly £10 for herself each time. Could she make more? Easily she says. A few very elite Avon Ladies are said to make six-figure incomes from the firm, but she’s happy to earn enough just to pay for her own cosmetics. Contact www.avoncompany.com for more information.

      Still, something tells me that Avon Ladies aren’t the wave of the future. If I were looking for a way to make a bit of extra income out of a few hours a day I think I would turn to eBay, the auction site where anything can be bought and sold to anyone. For inspiration take the case of Caroline Brown, an eBay trader who specializes in clothes. At 61 years old she has a lifetime of knowledge about fashion and fabrics behind her, so she visits charity shops all over the place, buys the good stuff and then auctions it on eBay. Does she make any money? You bet she does. As an accomplished dressmaker in her own right Caroline can separate the good stuff from the dross in seconds (‘it’s all about the cut and the fabric’) and while it is true that vintage clothes are all the rage and the pickings are thinner than they were even five years ago she says there are still plenty of bargains about: a piece of quality high street clothing that retails at £75 will probably sell for a tenner in a charity shop and £20 or so on eBay. That means that if you have a good eye, says Caroline, and you can shift ten or so items a week you could make £100–£150 a week relatively easily; she’s sold her wares to people in the US and in Japan as well as to residents of the Outer Hebrides (who haven’t much access to high street shops) and to a pub landlady in Wales. Caroline suggests looking in particular for the labels everyone knows – French Connection, for example – when you start out, as they are easiest to sell.

      But eBay isn’t just about fashion: if you want to do well on it you have to work with what you know. Suzette is very knowledgeable about books. She spends her spare time combing car boot sales, markets and country auctions looking for deals that she then sells on eBay. Sometimes she makes only £5 on a trade but sometimes she strikes it lucky too: she once sold a Kylie Minogue magazine supplement to a man in Florida for £85 and a rummage through a skip in Finchley provided her with £1,000 worth of sales in rare classical music books and RAF memorabilia. Overall, she has found that with a little concentration she can make up to £1,000 a month trading books. Suzette is a single mother so this is a very useful extra income for her. Carlotta isn’t a very active trader, but everything she needs for her two children is bought and sold on eBay: when she needs a new pram she saves money by getting it second-hand on eBay and when she doesn’t need it any more she claws the cash back by reselling it on eBay too. Below are Carlotta, Suzette and Caroline’s five top tips for doing well on eBay.

       Get all the relevant information about your product into the descriptive title. People won’t search under the words ‘stunning’ or ‘fabulous’ but under ‘skirt, green, size 12’. Suzette says she’s even made money buying things on eBay that had been badly listed and then reselling them.

       Try to have all your auctions end at the weekend, preferably on Sunday evening as that is when eBay is busiest and people have time to watch the items they want properly.

       Always overestimate rather than underestimate the postage costs – losing out here can be very irritating.

       Try to have everything sent by recorded next-day delivery. Most people are prepared to pay the extra for it and it means that you can keep track of your items and keep your feedback 100% good (everyone you deal with can rate you on eBay and if your feedback is less than around 98% good you’ll have trouble selling stuff).

       Be nice, be efficient and be scrupulously honest. On the Internet your feedback ratings (a proxy for your reputation) are the most important thing you have.

      “A large income in the best recipe for happiness I ever heard of.”

      Jane Austen

      The most common scams often have something to do with pyramid selling. These are effectively schemes that have as their sole purpose signing up other people to the scheme. You may be told that it is a sales company and that once signed up you will be making your money by selling cosmetics or drinks or some such but once you have handed over your ‘membership fee’ you will find that making money from the sales is no easy business. Instead the money is in signing up others. And you won’t be able to do that – it takes a particular kind of high-pressure sales personality to get other people in and most of us don’t have it. When I was in my early twenties I was persuaded to join a skincare products ‘multi-level marketing’ company (MLM is a polite term for pyramid selling) but I never made a single sale; in my heart of hearts I knew the stuff I was supposedly selling wasn’t much good and I just wasn’t up to the job of selling it and I certainly wasn’t up to the job of signing up anyone new to the scheme. Anyway all these schemes eventually collapse: they rely on an endless number of people being available to be signed up and the supply of people is, of course, never endless. When the supply of recruits dries up the pyramid collapses.

      What to watch out for in particular in the UK is so-called ‘gifting schemes’. The last well-known one was Women Empowering Women (WEW), which began in 2001 on the Isle of Wight. This was a pure cash pyramid – there was no pretence about there being any products of any kind involved. Women were asked to buy one of eight ‘hearts’ on a sheet; above that were four more, then two and finally one – the receiver – at the top. When new ‘gifters’ joined, the original members moved up the pile. When they reached the top they got the £3,000 contributions from the eight new hearts and took home £24,000. There was a lot of talk about helping other women and yourself at the same time and about making money outside the male capitalist society. It was all nonsense – WEW was as much a scam as any other pyramid scheme and like any other pyramid scheme it eventually collapsed. This was a shock to the women who lost money (remember, for every woman who was paid £24,000 eight had to lose their £3,000 stake) but if they had stopped to think about it for just a minute it really shouldn’t have been. Even to move one pyramid down six stages needed a quarter of a million people (8x8x8x8x8x8). To move it down twelve would have required the entire population of the world to be involved. This kind of pyramid still pops up periodically; they call themselves Hearts or Circles. Don’t fall for their stories of sisterly solidarity.

      The next money-losing scam to look out for is the lottery or prize draw scam. You’ll get a notification that you have won a huge prize, usually in a US or European lottery. You’re then asked for a registration fee or an admin fee, probably of a few thousand pounds. Don’t pay it – you’ll never hear from them again and you’ll never see your money again. This kind of thing often looks tempting but remember this: if you didn’t buy a ticket you can’t have won the lottery.

      Then there are the Nigerian 419 scams. These are called after the section of the Nigerian penal code that legislates against them. They’ve