Financial Friday

Time for another Financial Friday! I gave myself a challenge of reading one financial book per month throughout 2015. You can find the entire series HERE if you would like to catch up!

This month I chose to read All Your Worth: The Ultimate Lifetime Money Plan by Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi. Now I am not a political blogger, which is easy to see, I however love Elizabeth Warren. I am a big fan of her book The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Parents are Going Broke, I highly recommend it!  Seriously……go get the book! 

Alright so you have already figured out I am a little biased when it comes to Elizabeth Warren. I do however promise to not sugar coat my feelings about this book. The book was written in 2005 so a bit out of date. There is very little investing information however which would be the first things to become outdated. The majority of the book is about taking control of your finances and learning to live on the authors’ ideal of a perfect budget. 

Elizabeth and Amelia break down their budget process to three categories: Must Haves, Savings, and For Fun. Each category has a certain percentage associated with it. The though being that if your spending for each category remains in the targeted percentage then your budget will balance and you will be doing well. 

I added up our spending…….we are nowhere near their recommended percentages. It seems our Must Haves and our Savings take up too big a portion of our budget leaving very little money for our Just for Fun categories. 

*Don’t tell my husband that!*

The entire book is not just about their categories however. The book is broken down into the 6 Steps to Lifetime of Riches. These include escaping the thinking traps, counting the dollars not the pennies, building your future by paying off your past, building your dreams and more.  The book really does cover all of the basics required for starting and maintaining your budget over time. Complete with ideas of what to cut out if you are having trouble getting your budget to balance properly.

This is a great book to start with if you are feeling overwhelmed by budgeting and maintaining a budget over time. The authors cover such a wide variety of material that the book is extremely helpful to those just beginning the process of fixing your financial ship. Or those like myself that are always looking for new ways to tweak their budget to get the most for their income and time.

****I was not asked to review this book and received no compensation for doing so****