Customer Reviews

It's Your Money: Achieving Financial Well Being

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I have read more than a few financial planning books that promise to make sense of the mess that I have gotten myself in, but "It's Your Money" was the first to deliver on the promise. Instead of confusing you with pages and pages of mutual funds, insurance tips, tax breaks or rules, Karen McCall takes you through her unique step-by-step program. You answer questions that really make you examine why, how, and what you spend and how to make sense of it. By learning your personal spending and saving behaviors, the program is more personal to you and your situation. It takes work on your part, but the writing and self-examination is more than worth it. I HIGHLY RECOMMEND IT IF YOU FEEL FINANCIALLY OUT OF CONTROL.

As I started reading this strange spiral-back, "my own diary" format, book I found out , once again, that no script shall be judged by it's cover. Yes, this book is a well done, step by step, answer and help to those people who are not naturally gifted with the capacity of keeping in mind how much money they have, how they want to spend it, and most of all responding to the question "hey, what happened to my last months earnings, where the hell did they end up?". Simple tables, simple talk, no big words, the author breaks up the main concepts to what to do to keep track of your money and of your condition. You will finally understand the techinques for "holding on to your money till the moment you can do something really useful with it".

Leave the book alone if you're an economist, it's not for you, but buy the book if each time you look at your bank account you have a heart attack.

As others have implied, this book was focused more on people with problems with debt, but as a chronic saver (hey, I picked this book up at the library!), it helped me, too. I now have invested my money in diverse things instead of keeping it all in a savings account that had comparatively low returns. The workbook format worked well to demystify the issue of money and helped me to build a more complex, informed, and calm approach to money issues (I even read the business section every day -- it's no biggie, just a regular part of my life I take at my pace). In fact, her workbook is so good I've copied the basic questions/format to make my own workbooks on entirely different topics, and to good result! So this book has changed my life beyond just money. If I had bought it, it still would have paid for itself many times over by now.

I am big on journals so when I ran across this guide/journal for financial well-being I was delighted. True, I was a little skeptical at first because a lot of guides tend to go over my head when it comes to dealing with finance. This one was true to its word though. Divided into "levels" you deal with everything from your relaitonship with money to debt reduction to setting up attainable plans for the future. Once you put things down in the journal, like history of dealing with money to assessing your knowledge of areas such as investments, you will be astonished. A list staring back at you can be the cold, hard truth. Karen McCall, however, rallies you to change your relationship with your wallet and provides a new, optimistic release on a financial life for those of us just spending away.