Roses are the Valentine’s Day flower staple. Roughly 189 million are given in the U.S. on February 14, and if you ask me, I wouldn’t mind something a little different. Try tulips – they come in a variety of colors (like this pink, red, and purple bouquet), and are about $20 less expensive than roses.

When it comes to the Valentine’s Day gourmet chocolate arrangements in heart-shaped boxes… I’ll pass. Sure, the truffles are fantastic, but the Cointreau milk chocolate hearts or the mint crème ganache? Leave the herbs in the garden – I’d rather have Dove’s milk chocolate individually wrapped bites – which I can get in a 9.5 oz. package at Walgreen’s for $3. Put them in a gift bag, and you’re good to go.

Tiffany’s little blue box has a lot of significance (and it never hurts to get one), but this Valentine’s day, I suggest shopping around before deciding on a selection from their trendy key collection, or their traditional cufflinks for men. Beautiful, yes, but you can find something similar at Etsy.com for a fraction of the cost. Still not sold? Make something yourself – antique and thrift stores often have lots of old skeleton keys, pendants, and accessories for sale — and you’ll put a unique twist on today’s trends.

A night on the town is one of the top gifts each Valentine’s Day, according to the National Retail Federation – but the cost of one of these dinners can be a real test on your wallet. For example, a three course meal at famed Manhattan steakhouse Gallagher’s can run you a tab of $180 a couple. However, a homemade dinner for two featuring filet mignon, baked potatoes, and Seabrook farms creamed spinach (tell your honey you made it – he’ll never know) will only cost you about $35 – and you don’t even have to leave a tip.

One of the hottest gifts this year is Amazon’s new Kindle 2. With over-the-air book access in 60 seconds, the Kindle is versatile and portable – but at $259, it’s a bit out of most budget ranges for Valentine’s day. As an alternative, your techie can read books on his iPod touch or iPhone. With Stanza, a free app, you can download books to your device. Buy a few titles for your sweetie – and I’ll bet he’ll get a few for himself, too.

Other Gifting Tips:
Bing.com: Get 10 – 30 percent cash back on hot Valentine’s Day gifts from selected stores
Shutterfly.com: Create a customized photo book, starting at $13
LiveNation.com: Find concerts and comedians at small venues in your area (often for much less than you’d spend for a band’s concert at a larger venue)

WHAT: Kim’s Light Foods

WHEN: 2007

HOW: After spending much of her life trying to lose weight just to gain it back again, Kim Bensen decided that enough was enough. It took two years, 212 pounds, 200 cholesterol points, and too many sizes to count, but in 2003, Bensen was able to reach her weight loss goal – only to be met by another challenge. Bensen’s husband, Mark, a life-long diabetic, had health concerns that took him out of the workforce overnight – leaving her family of six with no income.

Bensen had developed recipes over that two-year span that she had begun to share online. All of her recipes were a hit, but her bagels were the crowd favorite – and it took her family’s version of an economic meltdown for Bensen to see that her bagels could become their own business. A friend encouraged her to pursue the opportunity, so after meeting with a commercial baker, Bensen developed a plan to launch her bagel business. Taking a big risk, Bensen spent almost all of her family’s savings — $18,000, to be exact – on their first 100,000 packages, featuring “before and after” photos of Bensen. “I told my husband, ‘if this doesn’t work, we’re going to have 100,000 doggie poop pick-up bags with my face on them!’” says Bensen.

“Money was tight,” says Bensen, and her family tried to cut costs as much as possible at home while trying to get the bagels to sell in stores. They were able to test the bagels in 40 grocery stores, but they simply weren’t selling. “It was frustrating, because we knew our bagels really tasted so good, you’d never know they were light,” says Bensen, but with no extra cash, they couldn’t afford to advertise. “We had the most unique position, but no way to tell our target audience!” So, with money generously donated by her aunt, Bensen decided to ship 60 packages to fitness centers near the grocery stores where the bagels were being tested – and they started flying off the shelves.

Today, the business has nine employees, and has made over $1 million in sales. The bagels come in six different varieties – all with less than 2 grams of fat, and only 110 calories! They hope to be distributed nationally by the end of 2010, which should be helped by a new product being launched this year – so keep your eyes open at your local grocery store (and at kimslightbagels.com)!

HER ADVICE:
“Have a vision, and love what you do,” says Bensen. “You have to love what you do because it will take all you have in you to get it going… but it will be so worth it!”

Margene: Nine thousand four hundred.

Bill: You have to sign over what you’re making to the common pot.

Margene: It’s a little more complicated than that. I think we should talk about accountants, and money managers, and lawyers.

That’s how it went on a recent episode of “Big Love.” Yet another example of how far – in our earning power and our intention not to cede the managing of that money – women have come. A report in mid-January from the Pew Research Center, entitled “New Economics of Marriage: The Rise of Wives,” confirms it with data. Women have made big gains in both education and in income. But rather than wreaking havoc on happiness and leading to an increase in divorce, it did the opposite. The effects were largely positive.

On the whole – yes – but what about relationships where the balance of power changed over time? “That would be a good question,” acknowledged D’Vera Cohn, one of the study’s lead researchers. “We took four or five snapshots of the population over time. We didn’t look at what changed in individual couples.”

Would it be equally rosy, I wondered, in relationships like Bill’s and Margene’s? Granted, they’re polygamists. But let’s put that aside for a moment. He married her – his former nanny – with the understanding that she’d take care of house and home and kids. This season she’s become a sensation on Utah’s equivalent of QVC and the balance of power has shifted. In cases like these, where the situation is not the one that either spouse signed up for, I suspect greater difficulty.

Psychologist Gail Saltz, whose most recent book is The Ripple Effect, says I’m right. “If it’s a desirable evolution for both people, when you have two people with high education levels and she is moving into a new career that brings an increasing income that might be just fine,” she says. “But it’s something different when you have a woman who started making money because her husband lost his job. And it’s something else still when it’s a woman who started making money because she changed and started wanting something.”

In that case, the key to the sort of happiness in the Pew study seems to be three things: open-mindedness, communication and finding another way to make him the man. Let’s take them one by one. First, the open mind. Gender roles, where he provides the financial support and she the emotional support, are not important to everyone, Saltz says. But if you were raised believing that to be the man is to be the protector and to be the woman is to be the nurturer and those roles get shifted – it’s probably not working for either of you.

That’s where communication comes in. “Part of what we do in couples therapy is work on amending those things,” says Saltz. “What does it really mean to be a woman? What does it really mean to be a man? And what are the other ways – besides money – that we can inject that into the relationship?” You can only move that needle so far in each generation, she acknowledges. But trying doesn’t hurt.

Especially when that trying occurs in bed. “If financially it’s not happening, you have to find other ways to make him the man,” she says. Because although we (and by we, I mean women) have little problem pointing out how hard this breadwinner swap is on men, we don’t realize how hard it is on us. What a lot of women don’t realize, Saltz points out, is that they start to feel less attracted because he seems less masculine because he’s making less money.

“It’s like his penis shrank,” she says bluntly. “Now you’re less attracted to him, but you’re the one who chopped it down to size. And he feels less masculine, too. You have to figure out a way to pump it back up again – to make him the man’s man in the bedroom while you can be the femme fatale.”

Oh – and just to be safe – you might want to throw in help around the house. That’s the suggestion from Andrea Doucet, who has interviewed more than 50 Canadian and American couples where the woman out-earns her spouse for her blog breadandrosesproject.ca. “It doesn’t matter who’s earning more,” she says. “What matters is what shifts at home. Yes, men are doing a lot more at home – with the children. But the evidence is it doesn’t translate into actual housework. That can be a tension point in the marriage.” One thing that helps, for lack of a better word, is hiring help – something middle-class women did not do much of in the ’70s, Doucet notes, but do avail themselves of today. Thank goodness.

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There has been a lot of news recently about work-at-home opportunities that have turned out to be scams — leaving people even more strapped for cash than they were to begin with. At times like these, when unemployment is up, scammers have a bigger pool of people to prey on.

So you’re wise to be careful. There are legitimate at-home jobs out there, but in your search, you need to keep your eyes wide open for some telltale warning signs. I asked Alison Southwick of the Better Business Bureau for her tips, as well as any red flags that should have you hitting the “back” button on your web browser right from the get go.

Red Flag: “Get Rich Without Leaving Home!”
There are plenty of safe ways to make money from home, including participating in surveys from large corporations. However, most of these opportunities can be found by doing a simple internet search – you don’t need to subscribe to a service like the one you found. In addition, a lot of these surveys pay very little – I’ve seen some offering 50 cents – and many pay in gift cards or coupons, not cash. “You can make money completing surveys and focus groups,” says Southwick, “but you’re probably not going to make a lot.” Always ask how much you’ll earn per survey, and how you’ll receive your due. You also should ask how you’ll receive the money — you shouldn’t have to give them your bank account information or Social Security number.

Red Flag: An employer asks for money upfront.
Southwick says that the BBB has received thousands of complaints from consumers saying they were scammed out of hundreds (and in some cases, thousands) of dollars, by providing money upfront for things like background checks, credit reports, supplies (such as envelopes or craft materials), or, in cases like yours, a membership fee. “The opportunity to make back that money is probably not there,” says Southwick, “and you could end up with less money than you started with.” Southwick also warns of deceptive marketing: “They might tell you they’re charging you a certain amount, but they sometimes will end up charging you more than they advertise – and then continue to bill you monthly.” She also advises you read the fine print – the money you cough up could very well be non-refundable.

Red Flag: You’re asked to deposit a check, and then wire-transfer money to a third party.
Some scams come in the form of “Mystery Shopper” schemes. They’ll send you a check, which initially clears after you deposit it. They’ll tell you to reserve some of that money to spend at different stores as a “mystery shopper,” and ask you to wire transfer the rest back to another party (the reasons vary scam to scam). You wire the money, and everything seems to be fine – until you find out that the check you originally deposited was a fake, and suddenly, you’re out hundreds (or thousands) of dollars.

The bottom line? If it sounds too good to be true, it is. Southwick suggests seeking out actual jobs that allow you to work from home, like telemarketer positions, rather than testing out multiple individual opportunities. Checking up on the company with your local Better Business Bureau is always a good idea, but if there’s no report, you can try something as simple as a Google search, although remember that what you read on the Internet is not always true. “Sites that claim to rate the top online survey opportunities aren’t always unbiased third parties,” says Southwick.  But there are many sites that allow consumers to post real reviews of their experience with a company (like IMReportCard.com) – and you can quickly find if the opportunities you’ve been checking into have (or have not) worked for others.

Women are getting a bad wrap. These days, more and more of us are taking charge when it comes to our family’s money. At the end of last year, a study by FindLaw.com found that 37 percent of married women between the ages of 18 – 34 handle all of the household finances, compared to 30 percent of married men. In a 2006 study by Money magazine, 60 percent of women said they’re responsible for budgeting, bill paying, and day-to-day spending in their households.

That, according to piles of research, turns out to be a good thing for your family’s balance sheet. Why? Because women are actually good at managing money. Take a look:

• A Merrill Lynch study a few years ago found that only 35 percent of women have held a losing investment for two long, versus 47 percent of men. To take it a step further, only 48 percent of women said they’ve since repeated the mistake, compared to 61 percent of men.
• The same study found that a quarter of men have bought “hot” stocks without research. Only 13 percent of women have admitted to doing the same.
• An international survey by Reuters in 2009 found that women are more responsible than men when it comes to money. They’re less likely to get in debt, and more likely work hard to be financially independent.
• A nine-year Bloomberg LP study, released in 2009, found that hedge funds run and managed by women nearly doubled the returns of those ran by men. The average woman-managed fund returned 9 percent; those managed by men returned only 5.82 percent. To add insult to injury, funds run by women were down only 9.6 percent at the peak of the financial crisis, compared to the 19% decline that funds managed by men saw.

Bottom line: Women are careful. We think decisions through before pulling the trigger, and instead of just taking risks, we take calculated risks. We also seek help, when we need it – and when it comes to money, many of us do – and we admit our mistakes. We are, when it comes right down to it, the perfect money manager for our families.

But taking responsibility for your family’s financial future is also good for your mental health. The American Psychological Association’s annual Stress in America survey recently found that financial stress takes a heavier toll on women. There are several ways to remedy that, but being educated is one of the best. If you know what’s going on with your family’s money, you don’t have to wonder whether you have enough in savings, or if that bill was paid on time.

“I do the budget and schedule the payments, and I know they will get there on time. I don’t feel in charge, because my husband is still involved, but I do feel less stressed,” says Kathleen Noland, who began handling her family’s money after a little trial and error. “We realized that I pay the bills on time, and I have a better sense of what’s coming in and going out, because I do most of the shopping. I also feel better when I’m in control.”

Of course, the best case scenario, in my book, is sharing the financial duties – or at least having regular money meetings so you’re both well-informed. It’s important to keep the lines of communication open – Kathleen says she and her husband have a conversation about their finances about once a week, and discuss with each other before making any big purchases. But no matter what system works for your family, clearly, it’s time to retire the stereotypes.

WHO

WHAT: Rent the Runway, where women can rent top designer dresses for a fraction of their cost!

WHEN: 2009

HOW: You can have a closet full of clothes, but when it comes to that high school reunion, cousin’s wedding, first date, or company party, you have nothing to wear. After seeing their friends and family resort to spending hundreds of dollars on a perfect dress that they’d only wear once, Jenny Fleiss and Jen Hyman, classmates at Harvard business school, knew there had to be a solution.

“We’re both entrepreneurs at heart,” says Fleiss, “and we knew this was our opportunity.” So, the two simultaneously ran focus groups among undergrads at Harvard and Yale and received their MBAs. Then, the pair began to meet with designers about the idea. “The first designer we met with was interested, and after that, we jumped right in,” says Fleiss. Putting in some of their own money for startup, the women said they’ve been bootstrapping since they began to put the company together. After seeking out a venture capitalist, the pair launched the site in November of last year.

Instead of splurging on a great find, only to feel guilty about buying it once the credit card bill arrives, Rent the Runway allows women to rent the dresses of runway designers – for about 10 percent of their retail cost. With roughly 600 dresses of their 1000 piece inventory in use on a daily basis, Fleiss and Hyman recently had to place an order to increase their inventory – by 5000 dresses. “We had to add them, just to keep up with demand!” says Fleiss. Fashionably and financially savvy, however, the girls added one major money-saver to their business model. The dresses are stored, serviced, and shipped, all from one convenient location – Slate NYC, a full-service dry cleaner. (Talk about one-stop-shopping.) The eco-friendly cleaner helps keeps the dresses looking and feeling newer for longer. Regular wear and tear is covered by a $5 insurance charge on each dress, and after 8 – 15 wears, the dresses are retired.

In the 11 weeks since they launched – that’s right, only 11 weeks – the site has accumulated over 160,000 members, has processed over 2,000 orders, and they’ve nearly broken even on their initial inventory purchase. The site now features the dresses of over 42 designers, “and we’re adding more every day,” says Fleiss. “Many women want glitzy, one-time wear pieces – things they never pictured themselves wearing,” says Fleiss. “Every woman wants the Carrie Bradshaw closet, and Rent the Runway allows women everywhere to have it.”

In the next few months, you can look forward to Rent the Runway adding a few new lines, including rentable accessories, and a bridal line, including bridesmaid dresses (“which are better looking than a lot of other bridesmaid dresses!” says Fleiss), as well as wedding dresses (“since brides really do only wear the dress once”). Even with their instant-hit status, Fleiss says that one of the best parts of the job is receiving thank-you notes and calls from customers. “It’s emotional for them,” says Fleiss. “Dresses like these make women feel confident and sexy, and we’re glad to give them that opportunity.”

THEIR ADVICE: “Go out there and sell the concept,” says Fleiss. “We didn’t sit down and make a business plan, because we knew trends and styles were changing every day, and we’d have to keep up with that – we didn’t waste any time, we just went out and started.”

Pop quiz:  How much do you spend each month on dining out? Gas?  How much do you give to charity?    Well, if you’re living in New York City (zip code 10016 to be exact), you spend $869 eating out, $67 on gas (you likely don’t own a car, and if you do it’s garaged much of the time), and give $148 to charity.  If you’re in San Francisco (94117), you spend $522 dining out, $114 on gas and give $74 to charity.  And if you’re in Houston (77036), just $147 eating out, but $146 on gas and give $62 to charity.

Personally, I find this sort of data fascinating.  I spend time wondering why folks in Houston spend so much less on auto expenses than in the other zips.  (Is it because a) cars hold up better in Texas, b) they know how to perform routine maintenance themselves, or c) they all have leased cars covered by warranty?)  I want to know how it is that people in Chicagoland (60643) can spend so much less on eating out and groceries. (Shouldn’t one go up as the other goes down?  Or did we – in choosing zips popular with WOW readers – happen upon one full of single women or empty nesters?)

Whether or not you enjoy this sort of comparative analysis, Bundle.com CEO Jaidev Shergill hopes you find the data useful.  The idea for the site, he said, came to him two years ago – before the financial crisis – when he got a small raise at Citi where he was working at the time.  “A month or two later, it hit me that more money was coming in but I was just spending it all,” he said.  “My house was the same.  My other basic expenses were the same.  I didn’t know where it was going.”  Most frightening: he hadn’t saved an extra dime.  “In my 20s that wouldn’t have been a problem.  But I was in my 30s.  I knew I should be saving more for retirement, but the behavior wasn’t there.  And I started to wonder – is it just my problem or across the country?”

The new site, funded by Citi (which provides aggregated anonymous data from its credit card accounts that is used to build the comparisons), Microsoft and Morningstar, allows you to compare with other people your age, at your income level, and again, by zip code.  US Government data, from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, is also used.
Shergill says the thing that gets him aren’t the average numbers, but the ranges.  To see that some people in the same age, income, zip are spending $3000 a month eating out but others are spending $250, he notes, “that’s the thing that completely kills me.”  He’s also paying attention to how much his spending is likely to increase as he heads into his 40s and even 50s.   As a result, Shergill says, he has changed his own behavior.  “I’ve started to look at how much I’m going to spend on my vacations, for instance, and put the money away beforehand so I don’t have to pay it off later.”

Here is the spending of some popular WOW zips.  Where do you fit in?

New York City: 10016
$631 on travel
$869 on dining out
$431 on groceries
$67 on gas
$124 on auto expenses
$271 on insurance
$148 on charity
$281 on school and child care

In San Francisco: 94117
$114 for gas
$284 for auto expenses
$247 for insurance
$74 for charity
$104 for school and child care
$522 on dining out
$415 on groceries
$385 on travel

In LA: 90004
$327 on dining out
$436 on groceries
$131 on travel
$235 on insurance
$152 on school and child care
$94 on charity
$165 on gas
$193 on auto expenses

Chicago: 60643
$182 on groceries
$158 on dining out
$150 on school and child care
$50 on charity
$333 on insurance
$113 on gas
$238 on auto expenses
$108 on travel

Houston: 77036
$288 on insurance
$88 on school and child care
$62 on charity
$137 on dining out
$222 on groceries
$146 on gas
$123 on auto expenses
$84 on travel

In Miami: 33155
$206 on auto expenses
$115 on school and child care
$47 on charity
$193 on insurance
$147 on travel
$165 on dining out
$301 on groceries

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