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Archive for the ‘Make Money Not Excuses’ Category

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. The first review is here and Chapter 1 is here.

So now that we’ve figured out where to begin, Make Money Not Excuses addresses the next common excuse Chatzky hears for why women aren’t taking charge of their financial future. Fear of numbers. From way back in the dark ages (like, when I was a kid) that evil stereotype that girls aren’t good at math rears its ugly head. I am here to tell you that girls can be great at math! But, there is a kernel of truth in the “I hate numbers” idea - math anxiety. A bad experience in the past with math, be it not doing well on a test, or not being able to do a problem on the chalkboard - can cause a lifelong phobia involving math and numbers.

Here’s the thing. Math hatred is a learned response. You can conquer it! And Chatzky gives a lot of ideas for how. In a nutshell, first learn to have a positive association with money - through saving for the sake of saving (saving feels good!), set a goal for something you want and save for it, then spend on it, invest in something you feel good about, and give to something you feel is important. Give yourself positive feedback in the form of the actions you take with your money.

Next, find your motivation and learn the basics. What motivates you around money? Is it a general improvement of your finances, or is there something specific? And then learn the basics - not calculus, but things like decimals and percentages. Knowledge is power, indeed.

I feel comfortable with numbers and math, but the last part of the chapter had information I could use - learning to ask for money. Meaning, learning to negotiate. I am terrible at negotiation. I just hate it. It makes me feel panicked and scared. Chatzky goes into the four emotional reasons for this response, and then six rules to follow to get the best deal. Since I’ll be shopping for a new furnace soon, I have to practice this. I need a good deal! Want to know the reasons? You’ll have to read the chapter to find out.

Next week we’ll discuss “But My Husband Does That…” which, again, I do everything, but I read it from the other side - how do I get my husband to be more involved? Do you hear me honey? We’re going to have yet another talk…

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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. The first review is here.

Last week I started my review of Jean Chatzky’s Make Money Not Excuses. The book sets out to empower women to take charge of their financial future by overcoming the fears that are holding them back. Today we’re going to look at the first fear: I don’t know where to begin.

Chatzky talks about that wherever she goes to give talks and presentations, there is always someone in the audience who eventually admits that their problem is that they have no idea where to start. Why? Why is that such a common problem, when we all make dozens of decisions every day? The answer is that with money, especially investing, there is often not a clear cut “right” and “wrong”. Which stock? Which mutual fund? The entire thing becomes too overwhelming. I know that I related to this when I read it, because it often does seem like I’m just shooting in the dark and hoping I don’t do something stupid. And, as the book says, the world of money involves higher stakes. So what if the South Beach bars I bought for my spouse don’t get eaten? I might hate wasting $3.00, but I’ll hate more losing thousands in the stock market. I saw myself in this, and I realized this is probably another of the long list of reasons I haven’t opened 529 accounts for my kids, and why my spouse hasn’t rolled over his IRA from a CD to mutual funds yet.

The best part of this chapter, to me, was The Power of Good Enough. In so many ways, I always think I need to be perfect, or the best, but Chatzky reminds us that we don’t. We simply need to be good enough. Our investments don’t have to outperform everyone else’s, they just have to do well enough to meet our goals. I have a lot of trouble with this, but its true. Trying to be perfect gets in the way of being good enough.

The Get Rich section of the chapter outlines eight ways to begin. I’m not going to go over each in detail, but I wanted to give a little snippet of what they are. In the book each has a great little mantra you can repeat to yourself to remember why it’s a smart choice along with the specific place to begin:

• Sign up for an automatic savings plan
• Call a local lawyer and tell him or her you need a will
• Pause before you purchase
• Start protecting your credit score
• Use a debit card, not a credit card
• Take money out of your savings or money-market account to pay off high interest credit card debt
• Call your benefits department at work and sign up for a 401K or increase your contribution, or a flexible spending account
• Save money on homeowners, auto, and life insurance - investigate options

The chapter ends with some questions from the money group, and my favorite is “What if I make a mistake?“. The answer? My short version of the answer - you will make a mistake. Do your best and move on.

Next week we’ll look at I Like Money, It’s Numbers I Can’t Stand. I myself love numbers, but I found some useful tips here for the math-phobic among us.

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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.

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