Are you Young, Fabulous and/or Broke?
Written: Mar 31 '08
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Clear explanations, good examples, sound advice.
Cons: I need money before I can follow most of her advice!
The Bottom Line: This would make a great gift for anyone in their twenties or thirties, including a great gift for yourself.
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| Jellyn's Full Review: Suze Orman - The Money Book For The Young, Fabulou... |
Suze Orman wrote a book for me! Sort of. It's The Money Book for the Young, Fabulous & Broke.
I was a bit worried I wasn't "young" enough or "fabulous" enough. Turns out "young" means twenties or thirties. "Fabulous" means whatever you want it to. But I think maybe I'm more "broke" than Orman's target audience here.
You may or may not know Suze Orman from her appearances on Oprah, her show or two that airs on PBS (usually during pledge drives), or her show on CNBC. She talks about money in a way that's easy to understand and has advice for the more average person rather than the upper middle and rich classes that some of those other financial shows cater to.
What's In the Book
Suze takes you step by step of what you need to know and what you need to do. You can skip around to the chapters that most interest you or that are the most relevant to you, but I think it makes sense to read it straight through from the beginning.
She starts by talking about your credit report and FICO score, what's involved in them, how to check up on them, and why they're important. She explains it in a straightforward manner, as she does everything in this book. She uses concrete examples which are very useful.
Particular helpful are the "Strategy Sessions" where a fictional Young, Fabulous and Broke (YF&B) person states a problem they have and Suze gives a short answer and a longer, detailed answer.
She has advice about the early stage of your career and how you should be working on building up a good career and not so worried about the money at first. She discusses how to best use credit cards to your advantage and how to manage your student loan debt.
She moves on to talking about 401(k)s and Roth IRAs. This is early on, but she's already at a point that's beyond me, as I don't have a fulltime job and therefore little money and no benefits. But I kept reading anyway.
She tells you about the type of funds available in most retirement plans and the relative benefits and drawbacks to each.
The final chapters are on buying a car (not leasing!) and purchasing a home. Neither thing am I ready to do, but I like knowing more about the different mortgage plans and all those little fees you probably wouldn't think of when considering buying a house.
And the last major chapter is entitled "Love and Money", though it's not entirely about hooking up with a spouse, as she discusses other relationships such as siblings, friends, or parents. She goes into wills versus trusts a little bit and how to borrow money from friends, for example.
My Thoughts
This book is maybe an inch shorter than your average hard cover and when you open it up, there's not a lot of text on each page. Plus there are a lot of sort of 'filler' pages that don't have any real content on them. They just look pretty. At first you might think you're not getting a lot of bang for your buck, but I actually grew to like the format. It makes it seem like this money thing isn't so hard after all.
What I like about this book and Suze Orman in particular is that she doesn't just explain things, she offers solid recommendations. She gives you all the facts so you could draw your own conclusions, but then she tells you what she'd do in your situation and backs it up with a reasonable explanation. Everything she says just seems to make sense.
I'm sure if you followed every bit of advice in this book, you couldn't go too far wrong.
The major drawback is that this book rather assumes you have and want a career that involves having an employer. It doesn't go into entrepreneurship or being a contractor or being an artist/writer/creative genius. As such, some of the book didn't really speak to me. And I wonder how many other young and fabulous people don't want traditional job-type careers.
So this a good book and it might work perfectly for a good number of people, but it does fall short for others.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
Jellyn
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Location: New Hampshire
Reviews written: 210
Trusted by: 47 members
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