I’ve Paid For This Twice Already…

Make Money Not Excuses Review: Why Aren’t You Richer?

For the foreseeable future, every Friday afternoon I will be reviewing a section of Jean Chatzky’s Make Money Not Excuses and how it relates to me and my financial situation and outlook. This is the first review encompassing an overview of the book and the introduction.

A few weeks ago, the publishers of the paperback edition of Jean Chatzky’s Make Money Not Excuses contacted me and asked if I would be interested in receiving a copy of the book. I looked it up online and it sounded interesting, so I said yes. And honestly, once I started reading it, I couldn’t put it down. I don’t watch a whole lot of TV, so I’d never even heard of Jean Chatzky (she is on the Today Show as the financial editor as well as contributes to Oprah) but I am glad I accepted the book - it has inspired me to take action on a number of things I’d been putting off including helping me loosen my deathgrip on my “stuff”, and gave me a whole new way to look at the excuses I make for ignoring parts of my financial picture. Over the next several weeks (I am honestly not sure how many, but more than 4 and less than 14), I am going to take a deeper look inside a section of the book, talk about what it covers, and how it related to my own life and where we are now. Each review will encompass at least a chapter of the book.

Make Money Not Excuses is geared specifically towards women and their relationship with money. The book is subtitled “Wake Up, Take Charge, and Overcome Your Financial Fears Forever”, and the book basically takes 10 common financial “excuses”, really fears, that account for why women don’t take more control over their financial future, and breaks each of them down in its own chapter. Not every fear will apply to every person, but looking at all ten, there will be something to relate to a majority of people. Each chapter is broken into two sections - the first looks at the reasons people use for avoiding financial responsibility (a deeper look into the “excuse”), and the second section gives practical steps for moving forward. Interspersed within each chapter is the “Map to a Million” - showing how the small (or large) changes outlined will affect you financially and put you on the road to millions - with hard numbers. And bookending each chapter is questions from Chatzky’s “Money Group” - her real-life money discussion group (there are even tips to start your own if you are so inclined) and Chatzky’s answers to those questions.

But enough about the structure of the book (although I found it very accessible and appealing). The introduction is titled “Why Aren’t You Richer?” and - why aren’t we? Chatzky outlines that there are just four things we need to do to become wealthier than we are today:

• Make a decent living
• Spend less than you make
• Invest money you don’t spend so it can work as hard for you as you’re working for yourself
• Protect yourself and the financial world you’ve built so disaster (big and small) doesn’t take it away

There are lots of small things you can do, but these four are the “cornerstones” upon which everything else is built. She then goes into the statistics of how women fall short financially, and says these aren’t reasons we’re not richer - they’re the results. And we can change them, if only we can work through our excuses and get out of our own way. She listed a number of common excuses, and then wrote something that really hit the nail on the head for me and made me think “Duh, why didn’t I realize that before?”

These excuses allow us to believe that it’s okay that we don’t know where to start.

And for me, that totally rang true. Being able to just say a common excuse, like “Investing is over my head” gives me permission in my own mind to continue to ignore it. Someday, when I have more time to think about it…

But that’s not okay. Just because I can trick myself into letting me off the hook doesn’t mean that I should be. I’ve made a whole lot of progress in a short time, but I can’t be satisfied with just that. The book spoke to me in that sentence, and it continued to in different ways throughout the rest of the book, which is why I am so excited to share it with my readers.

Chatzky then outlines her own financial awakening, and talks about why more and more women are now at a turning point with wealth - we make more, so we start wanting more control, and we started wanting actual wealth. And that’s a good thing. We should be prepared for the future. We shouldn’t become a depressing statistic.

With that, the ten excuses we’ll explore in detail in the coming weeks and shed once and for all are:

1. I Don’t Know Where To Begin
2. I Like Money - It’s Numbers I Can’t Stand
3. But My Husband Does That…
4. ‘m Too Disorganized To Deal With My Money
5. I Don’t Have Any Time
6. I Have Nothing To Wear
7. I’d LOVE To Start Saving, But I Don’t Know How
8. I Can Deal With My Money - It’s Investing I Can’t Stand
9. I’m Too Old - Its Too Late For Me
10. I Don’t Want To Think About It

As I said, some will apply to particular people more than others, but within them, there is something for everyone, I think. Next week, we’ll learn where to begin.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!