Book 5 Count on Yourself (Take Charge
of Your Money) by Alison Griffiths from Touchstone – a Division of
Simon and Schuster.
Alison's latest book, Count on Yourself
was the January Yummy Mummy Book Club pick. One thing that sets
Alison apart from other finance authors is her style isn't my way or
the highway, but rather she works on becoming your friend or
confidant.
Count on Yourself is written by a
Canadian for Canadians and was released when a number of us are
looking at our RRSPs in the ramp up to tax season. The book is an
easy read with lots of tips for you to manage your investments. Each
of the four sections of the book covers a specific step in getting
you to be your own money manger. I also like that Alison uses
example of everyday people from all walks of life including her own
experiences.
Part 1 talks about how we are willing
to share almost all aspects of our life with our girlfriends, but the
second the conversation turns to money, even a simple question that
doesn't require you to share dollar amounts, we clam up. She doesn't
get into the psychology of this but rather discusses that we have to
talk about it so that we can learn about it and become proficient in
managing our investments with very little time investment on our
part. This section really drives home that we are not alone.
The second part deals with putting our
financial closet in order. Not so much how to get control over
debts, etc, but cataloguing the financial instruments and what we
know about each item. The goal of this exercise is to make you aware
of what you have and see if there are ways to trim what you need to
managing (by having fewer items) to make things simpler. It was an
interesting exposes and even the accountant in me hadn't previously
considered such an inventory. I especially liked the idea of
streamlining your user name and passwords for all aspects of your
life, as much as is possible.
I felt that parts 3 and 4went together
well, summing up the whole book. Not only do you need to make a
plan before you take action but you need to have that plan in place
so that once you take action you can reflect making sure you are
doing as planned or make necessary changes. Those changes could be
to your original plan or to keep your action on track with your plan.
The examples and explanations in these two sections go along way to
help anyone take control of their investments.
Count on Yourself (Take Charge of Your
Money) is well worth the read if you want to understand your
investments and take a more active role in understanding them. It
has given me food for thought and I'm hoping to get my husband to
read it. My problem is that the book reads as though it was written
for women rather than both sexes so I'm not sure it will hold a guy's
interest.
No comments:
Post a Comment