How do you achieve a balanced financial life and lasting wealth?
Conventional advice does not teach people how to balance conflicting demands from living expenses, credit cards bills, mortgages, college funds, and retirement investments. Finally, there is a book that does.
"If I'm So Smart, Where Did All My Money Go?" is an engaging look at ten diverse characters who each face different financial challenges.
By following these examples, you will learn how to apply the lessons to your own life. After reading this story you will have learned:
Exactly how much YOU need to save for your Home, College, and Retirement
How to prioritize YOUR savings goals
Exactly how much YOU can afford to spend on everything: your house, your car, food, clothing, and entertainment
Which debt YOU should pay off and which you should keep
Whether YOU should buy a home or rent one
When YOU should invest in stocks and when to choose safer investments
You will learn to balance each of your financial objectives in order to achieve all of them. Most important, you will develop a level of confidence in your financial future that you never imagined possible.
Professional Reviews
Bookviews by Alan Caraba
Another book for people trying to figure out survival in these hard times is If I’m So Smart…Where Did All My Money Go? Balancing Your Financial Objectives for Lasting Wealth by Doug Warshauer ($24.95, CFMB Books, Morton Grove, IL). The author looks, for example, at why so many people bought homes they couldn’t afford with mortgages they couldn’t pay? Also, why people with good salaries can’t seem to put money aside at the end of the month in savings or an investment account? The book is about financial stability for families, individuals, and senior citizens. Using a fictional financial seminar, he explains his recommendations through the stories of ten people attending it. If this is a problem with which you are grappling, this book will prove helpful.
Kirkus Review
A realistic, detailed guide to planning for your financial future.
Warshauer was a small business forecaster by trade, skilled at incorporating the myriad of financial factors that make up the universe of a small company and projecting their expenses and profitability. In a burst of insight, he decided to apply those same methods on a more intimate scale. He has thus come up with an excellent set of guidelines in the hopes of ensuring a stable financial future for individuals and families. The plan—five big steps composed of 18 smaller steps—is very sensible, and each bears Warshauer’s hallmark: accounting for the different life goals that each person or family will have. He begins by explaining how much of our net income should be saved, spent on homes and auto, and even spent on clothing. He provides a numerical guideline for each area, insisting that if spending in one category goes up, it must drop in other areas. These short-term goals segue into long-term planning, such as the decision to save for public school versus private, and how to understand how much each family will need for retirement. These insights take the book one step deeper than the average financial-planning instructional. The book is also unique in that Warshauer presents the rules for financial success in the form of a story. Joe, one of the main protagonists, is a generic young adult who spends more than he’s earning, and thus decides to attend one of the author’s financial seminars. Other characters include single mothers and young parents. The fiction structure is loose, basically just a tool to help the author dispense his financial rules in a way that keeps readers engaged. Naturally, the dialogue itself tends to get tedious, as seminar attendees ask dry questions about finance, but on the whole it’s more readable than a strictly nonfiction manual.
A helpful introductory guide to financial planning for singles and families looking to get the most out of their money.
