Busy Family’s Guide to Money

This is a very good basic guide to money, geared primarily to families. One of the big advantages of this book is the USA TODAY format, which makes it an easy read. No need to sit down and immerse yourself in this book for hours at a time. You can pick it up, open it to a section, read for 10 or 15 minutes, and come away with some useful information. Conversely, though, I can see why some people might consider this book TOO simple. The “McPaper” format that is USA TODAY–with short articles, lots of sidebars, the Snapshot features, etc.–might not go over well with people who take their finances very seriously. I, however, didn’t have a problem with it. In fact, within about 20 minutes of picking this book up for the first time, I got some very useful information about income tax deducions for medical expenses. That information alone made the book very worthwhile. For someone looking for basic, easy to digest financial tips, this book is a great place to start.
Rating: 4 / 5

Do you feel like you’re too busy to learn about personal finance? Do you believe the only way to get a handle on things is to pay big $$$ to some financial planner? If you think either of these statements applies to you, The Busy Family’s Guide to Money will help you to begin managing your financial affairs yourself.

Personal finance books often suffer from being lengthy and dull or, at the opposite extreme, full of useless and gimmicky “secrets” and “systems” for “generating wealth.” Nolo and USA Today have produced a book that avoids both of these problems by combining Nolo’s experience in providing reliable, no-frills legal guidance with USA Today’s clear and concise writing style.

The book provides solid and conservative advice for each of the critical activities of family financial planning: budgeting, saving, investing, managing debt, and protecting assets. There is a lot of information for people with families, including how to talk with kids about money, the tradeoffs between saving for college and saving for retirement, and the basics of estate planning. Regular readers of USA Today will appreciate the frequent appearance of infographics and man-on-the-street anecdotes throughout the text.

A major drawback of this guide, though, is that the investment advice is very basic. Anybody who is interested in going beyond simply picking mutual funds in a 401(k) or an IRA account will need to do additional reading. Even worse, the chapter on investing contains a very strange suggestion for mixing index funds with actively managed mutual funds that is counterproductive and could turn out to be excessively risky.

Bottom line: The Busy Family’s Guide to Money will give anybody who wants to begin managing their own finances a good start. While the book doesn’t go into much depth on any topic, it does provide decent and accessible guidance in the most important aspects of personal finance. The principles and advice are universally applicable for the most part. Young singles and people who are retired or close to retirement, however, probably would find books specifically targeted to them to be more useful. 3.5 stars, rounded down to 3 due to the bizarre index fund/mutual fund idea.

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And now, some books about investing I recommend:

Core: Stocks for the Long Run (Siegel), The Four Pillars of Investing (Bernstein), A Random Walk Down Wall Street (Malkiel)

Advanced: Unconventional Success (Swensen), The Only Three Questions That Count (Fisher), Fooled by Randomness (Taleb)
Rating: 3 / 5

This book is geared for the 125K+ crowd who have 2 kids in college with a house that’s almost paid off and no other debt. The chapter on budgeting was unbelieveable if not outright ludicrious. There were no percentages given that indicate what would be an acceptable amount to spend for each category. For example, it said to list what you spend on mortgage, credit card debt, car payment, student loans and entertainment. The budget failed to mention food expenses. There is no line at all for groceries. There’s an “eating out” category but to fail to mention the second largest expenditure in any budget is groceries that’s a major oversight.

It included eating out expenditures as $300. The average family of four spends $650 a month on groceries with another $150 on cleaning supplies and paper products. That’s huge. Most families could manage their money if they could cut their grocery bills in half. It’s quite possible using websites like Greatest Secrets of the Coupon Mom that teach you how to spend more wisely. This book does not help you do that.

Their other budget suggestion was to get rid of the second car. If you live in a big city where public transportation is viable then perhaps that would make sense. However, the majority of Americans live in a rural environment and a second car is a necessity not a luxury.

Overall, skip this book and go with something else. Suggestions would be Women & Money: Owning the Power to Control Your Destiny or Are You Being Seduced into Debt?: Break Free and Build a Financially Secure Future.
Rating: 2 / 5

Nolo is great at compiling information and making it easy to understand. I found this book a complete gem! The quote I found the most inspiring from this book was, “Realizing that money is a tool to realize your life goals.” We shouldn’t look at saving as difficult or the enemy but try to understand how to save intelligently and make a workable saving plan.

The first section goes over the conflict of money in a relationship and making compromises in a reasonable manner. There were several questions the book brought up that made me think of what I really wanted to do with my money. Next it tells you how to make a spending plan and gives you resources to find sheets to help you organize how much you spend each month and where it goes. It also spend considerable amount of time on debt and ways to get out of it. Then there is a rather big section devoted to insurance (health, disability etc). I really view insurance as the enemy but it is important and I will have to rethink my insurance plans. Nolo also give helpful advice and tells you how to compare and get the best rates for your cash. Next the is a large section on taxes and areas you may be able to save which was surprisingly easy to read. It also goes over: your goals, retirement, thinking ahead (wills etc.), saving for tuition, and even stocks and mutual funds. This book was an amazing resource.

To recap, I found Nolo’s book thorough and comprehensive. However, if you are looking for very specific details on saving money, the Nolo book have good general information and gives resources you can look into. But may not be as precise as you may want, so you will have to see a specialist but at least you know where to start! But what I really enjoyed about this book is it really made me think about saving money in different ways and made saving money look easier than I imagined. This book is well worth the price and will be a keeper for me for years to come!

Rating: 5 / 5

This is essentially a guide on how to manage your money, especially if you’re a busy family. My family’s money problems can be summed up in seven words, “Too much outgo and not enough income.” That being said there is something you can do between the outgo and the income. A budget is one thing and something I’d never really done before, that’s good advice. Taking control of my healthcare, well, we’ve got the cheapest plan we can get, so we’re doing what we can on that front. Planning for retirement, haven’t started as we believe salting money away for out kid’s college education is more important.

In short there is some helpful advice in this guide and some obvious advice as well. We learned somethings, somethings don’t apply to us and somethings we’d already been doing. One thing we hadn’t been doing was educating our kids on the importance of money management. Mostly they’d see something they want at Toys R Us and we’d just buy it for them. We’re working on that now. That’s part of the outgo we’re cutting back on. These are tough times and it looks like they’re going to get tougher, so like many, were cutting back on a lot of that outgo. And there is some good advice here on how to do just that.
Rating: 5 / 5