(MONEY Magazine) – At 12:30 one morning last November, freelance journalist Leslie Albin, 33, finished writing a newsletter on the telephone industry for her client, a Washington, D.C. trade association. After turning off the computer in the home office of her four-room bungalow in suburban Chevy Chase, Md., she began to unwind, first soaking in a hot bath and then listening in the dark through her headphones to a rock album by Bruce Hornsby and the Range. At 3 a.m., feeling unaccountably nervous, she made sure that all the doors and windows were locked. Minutes later, she fell asleep. A dish towel thrown on her face woke her to the terrifying sight of a ski- masked head inches from her own. Holding a knife with a three-inch blade to her throat with one hand, the intruder stuffed the towel into her mouth with the other, threatening to kill her if she struggled. Then he raped her and fled noiselessly into the night. The police later concluded that the assailant had entered the house by prying open a sliding glass window in the dining room, wedging and flexing his fingers between the frames until the window lock popped. Says Albin sardonically: ''He was very tidy -- he carefully shut the window when he left and even put back a plant he'd knocked over.'' To date, he has not been caught. Albin's experience is chillingly common: the latest federal statistics list 90,430 forcible rapes in 1986. That figure may actually be too low by a factor of 10, according to criminologists, because so many victims do not report the crime out of shame or fear.

For Leslie Albin, there is fear. Seven months after the assault, she still dreads the night and awakens each morning around 3 a.m., the hour when she was attacked. But what truly gnaws at her is how the crime threatened the very concept around which she has built her life: the sense that she can control her own destiny. Says she: ''The rape was relatively easy; I just waited for it to be over. But the idea that anybody could kill me if I didn't do what he wanted -- that's what blew me away.'' Yet in the months since the assault, Albin has determinedly pursued the same goal of self-sufficiency -- ''I've never been marriage-minded,'' she notes -- that has spurred her since childhood. A sweet-natured if high-strung single, she has thrown herself into her career, soliciting long-term projects from her clients, mostly in the telecommunications industry, while turning out ! the weekly assignments that brought her $45,697 during the past 12 months. Even as Albin recovers emotionally, however, she grows more concerned about her financial life. Until seven months ago, she thought her finances were tidy. Her medical and disability insurance (cost last year: $1,769) seemed ample. She had a $6,525 retirement stash. And her white cottage on a quiet cul-de-sac, which she bought in 1983 for $73,000, has ridden the Washington area's strong real estate market to a value of $101,000. Her monthly mortgage payments are a manageable $700, though with taxes and insurance, her total housing costs came to $9,538 in the past year. The expenses, she says, ''keep me vacationless.'' But in the aftermath of the crime, she is looking for even more financial security. First, she wonders whether her retirement savings are sufficient and growing enough. Next, she questions whether her disability policy is adequate, and finally, she needs help finding new medical coverage, having dropped out of an $84-a-month Kaiser Permanente health maintenance organization. Her decision to do so was rash, since it left her utterly without medical protection, but it was perhaps understandable. Soon after the rape, Albin explains, ''I called Kaiser for follow-up care and was given an appointment with a psychiatrist who saw me for 30 minutes, prescribed sleeping pills that later caused me to pass out, and failed to keep our second appointment. When I went back to have the medication changed, the doctor who was to see me never showed. I complained to Kaiser's quality assurance man, who promised that someone would get back to me. No one did, and when my December bill arrived, I decided it was foolish to continue paying for noncare, so I quit.'' (Kaiser spokesman Stephanie Strass insists that the HMO's ''resources were made available to Ms. Albin, but she failed to use them appropriately.'') Currently, Albin is looking for a professional association of writers or home-based entrepreneurs that offers low-cost group health insurance. Meanwhile, she is putting out $140 a month for weekly, 50-minute sessions with a psychotherapist. The expense would be twice as great except that Albin's practitioner, to whom she was referred by the D.C. Rape Crisis Center, keeps her fees low on principle for patients who lack insurance. Albin pays $761 a year for disability insurance, which she bought in 1987 from Monarch Life. If disabled, she can collect up to $1,400 a month after a 60-day waiting period, which is typical for such policies. ''The waiting period made the policy affordable,'' notes Albin, ''and I thought I could handle two months without income.'' Now she is not so sure. The assault left her too shaken to work for six weeks, depriving her of an estimated $4,700 in earnings. On top of that, she had to pay more than $530 in crime-related expenditures, ranging from $290 to replace bedding confiscated by the police as evidence to $155 for outdoor lights and shatterproof plastic windows and doors to make her house more secure. (She rejects the notion of moving as a capitulation to fear.) Though Maryland is among the 46 states that offer crime victims compensation, Albin got nothing because the program was out of funds. And she makes too much to qualify for a county reimbursement program, which in 1987 carried a $9,700 income cap for a single person. So she paid her bills from the $8,000 that she was keeping in a money- market bank account to carry her through a freelancer's inevitable dry spells. That account, in which she tries to maintain at least $6,000, makes up the bulk of Albin's relatively thin liquid assets. The rest is a mere 24 shares of Citizens & Southern, a Georgia bank. The stock, a gift from her late mother, was recently worth $576. Says Albin: ''I'd sell if there was enough to justify the broker's commission.'' Albin calls her lack of liquidity ''the today headache.'' But she worries more, she says, about ''the tomorrow headache'' -- her retirement fund. Most of it is in a Keogh to which she contributed $4,000 last year. The money was a windfall in the form of unexpectedly high royalties ($5,000 in all) from two market research studies on the telephone industry that she wrote for trade journals. She has invested the Keogh conservatively, in the global fixed- income mutual fund Putnam Master Income Trust, recently yielding 11.32%, and in an 18-month bank certificate of deposit that pays 7.3%. Albin also has a $1,393 CD earning 8.14% in a rollover Individual Retirement Account, a relic of her stint seven years ago with Phillips Publishing, which puts out telecommunications, banking and defense newsletters in Potomac, Md. ''Payroll deductions made it easier to save then,'' she admits. Still, she remains committed to working on her own, a decision she made after eight years of staff jobs that began a dozen years ago. The only child of an office-supplies salesman and a homemaker, Albin grew up in Fort Lauderdale and graduated in 1976 with a degree in communications from Florida Atlantic University, a state school with 10,700 students in Boca Raton. She was attracted to journalism, she says, because ''it offered a chance to learn something new all the time.'' Her first job out of school was as a $160-a-week newspaper reporter for the Orlando Sentinel. Within two years, however, she had moved on to the Miami Herald. ''I was Ms. Career in those days,'' she recalls, ''and the Herald was the big time.'' But eventually she found the newspaper ''such a pressure cooker'' that she quit.

DECIDING TO GO THE FREELANCE ROUTE In 1981, she moved to Washington and went to work at Phillips Publishing, which had hired her a month earlier during a brief job-hunting trip to the capital. She expected to be there six weeks -- ''I thought I'd be fired, since I didn't know anything about telecommunications,'' she says -- but stayed on for 2 1/2 years, moving up to managing editor of the weekly Telephone News. She was lured away in December 1983 by the chance to start up a publishing program of reports and newsletters in Washington for the management consulting division of Touche Ross. ''As the founding editor, I figured I'd be free to do my own thing,'' she remembers. But after seven months she became frustrated by what she describes as ''a combination of bureaucracy and the macho boys' club atmosphere that prevailed there'' and quit. Concluding that she was also ill at ease in big firms, she decided to indulge a longstanding urge to freelance. To her surprise, Touche Ross accepted her proposal that she be hired as a consultant, thereby becoming her first client. She was paid $1,500 a month and grossed $34,000 for the year. Since then her cash flow has waxed and waned, and indeed this year Albin may have to do some belt tightening. Without the $5,000 in royalties that she received in 1987, she expects her income to drop to the high $30,000s. ''That sort of thing makes freelancing scary,'' she confesses. ''Sometimes I'm tempted by offers of $45,000 jobs with insurance thrown in. But I always end up turning them down -- I'm hooked on my freedom.''

BOX: Bottom Line

For a time after she was assaulted, Leslie Albin was spending almost 8% of her income on medical expenses. The $3,629 item below includes payments for an HMO to which she no longer subscribes and bills for prescription drugs and psychotherapy. Income and outgo for the 12 months that ended April 30: +

INCOME

Earnings $45,697 Interest 502 Stock dividends 24

Total $46,223

OUTGO

Taxes $12,912 Housing costs 9,538 Keogh contribution 4,000 Medical expenses 3,629 Groceries 2,697 Home maintenance 2,524 Car expenses 2,241 Utilities 2,105 Business expenses 2,101 Miscellaneous 1,354 Entertainment 1,343 Clothes 819 Disability insurance 761 Life insurance 64 Gifts 60 Contributions 50 Credit-card interest 25

Total $46,223

ASSETS

House $101,000 Money-market account 8,399 Personal property 7,900 Retirement savings 6,525 Business equipment 1,500 '78 Volkswagen 650 Debts receivable 592 Citizens & Southern stock 576 Checking account 206

Total $127,348

LIABILITY

Mortgage $76,293

Total $76,293

NET WORTH $51,055

The Advice Buy health insurance immediately

-- THE PROBLEMS How to obtain health coverage, get better disability benefits and beef up retirement savings

-- THE SOLUTIONS 1. Make yourself eligible for a group health plan. 2. Keep your present disability policy. 3. Invest in growth stocks.

Richard Wagener, a certified financial planner in Columbia, Md., joined Silver Spring insurance broker Thomas St. Clair in counseling Leslie Albin at MONEY's request. Key recommendations: Health insurance. Albin should waste no time in getting coverage. With her small cash reserves, she cannot afford to run the risk of a serious illness or accident. But because of her psychotherapy -- a tip-off to insurers of a pre- existing medical condition -- she will have trouble qualifying for an individual plan. Both advisers suggested that Albin look into joining the National Organization for Women, which sponsors a group plan that would cost her $237.69 a year. She would probably have to wait a year before getting coverage for psychotherapy. In the meantime, however, she would be protected against all other medical expenses. After satisfying a $100 annual deductible, she would pay 20% of covered costs up to $1,000 and owe nothing for expenses above that. Disability insurance. Albin is lucky to have her present policy, which is adequate for now, and she should hold on to it at all costs. Disability carriers rarely sell insurance to freelancers because of their fluctuating incomes -- it makes figuring out how much coverage they need difficult, and the carriers do not want to overinsure them. Furthermore, insurers are loath to extend new coverage to anyone in psychotherapy, since disabilities stemming from mental or emotional disorders can be hard to verify. If she decides in the future that she needs additional coverage, she should buy it through the guaranteed insurability rider attached to her present policy. It allows her to increase her benefit every year. Next year, for example, she could add $100 to her monthly coverage for just $49. (For more on disability insurance, see Family Finance on page 121.) Retirement savings. Instead of searching for more disability insurance, Albin is better off beefing up her cash reserves (now $6,000 to $8,000) to $10,000 -- enough to cover three months' living expenses. Anything she can set aside above that can go into her retirement fund and should be invested in an equity mutual fund, since her Keogh is exclusively in fixed-income securities. Richard Wagener suggested that she consider Strong Total Return (1% load; 800-368-3863), up 62.8% in the three years that ended March 31 (compared with 43.5% for the average general equity fund). Two other recommendations: Phoenix Growth (800-243-1574), up 122.9% for the five years through March, or Phoenix Stock, which returned 112.7%. The disadvantage is that both funds carry a steep 8 1/2% front-end sales charge. Wagener also thought Albin should hold on to her shares of Citizens & Southern. The bank, Georgia's largest, lately rid itself of risky Third World debt. Hence, Wagener thinks the stock (recently traded over the counter at $26.50) is a solid growth investment.

Soon after, Albin said that she was looking into a group medical plan sponsored by the Washington Independent Writers, an association of freelancers, and had sent away for a brochure on NOW's plan. ''I want to figure out which is cheapest,'' she said. ''Cheap is very much on my mind because I just paid $3,000 in quarterly estimated taxes.''