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Women & Money

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  • Women & Money

    I first heard of Suze Orman right here on iMSN, from cupcake. I was intrigued but hesitant. We didn't have much money to worry about (until recently), my husband does a fine job keeping track of our finances, I never learned the first thing about investing so surely I'd be over my head reading a personal finance book.

    Well, all of these concerns are addressed and negated in Suze Orman's Women & Money: Owning the power to control your destiny. Suze discusses how gender roles have changed so drastically in the past few decades, how typical female personality traits and adherence to stubbornly persistent relationship roles have held many women back from taking control of their personal financial situation: women from successful CEOs to SAHMs, from young women in their 20s to widowed retirees. No matter how much your family makes, no matter how much you personally bring in, you need to think about what your money is doing for you, and you need to shed any blame or shame surrounding the amount of debt you have, the choices you've made, or your current grasp of money matters. Leave the blame and shame behind, start now, and succeed one step at a time!

    I love how she steps through everything from the basics of how to get or stay out of debt, to ideas for saving and investing, proposals for SAHMs and single moms to start building financial freedom, and firm suggestions for ways to protect the money you have through legal means and insurance coverage. She starts from ground zero so you never have to feel ashamed at a gap in your financial education, but her ideas range right up to more advanced portfolio allocations and complicated legal documentation.

    I've been reading a lot of personal finance and investing books, but I'm so glad I read this one. It's full of commonsense advice, and I learned that I really like Suze's thought process and writing style. But most importantly, it gave me a lot of reassurance about my level of financial knowledge and my ability to keep building on my current understanding and play an active part in our household money decisions. I'll be reading more of her books (have already downloaded her latest from the library!) and I recommend this one to any of y'all at any stage of training!
    Alison

  • #2
    I haven't read that one, and I've always been the one to keep track of the money (so no shame about where we are and what I don't know), but I also like Suze's style, and her advice always makes a ton of sense. This thread reminds me that I need to start looking into various insurances, too.
    Sandy
    Wife of EM Attending, Web Programmer, mom to one older lady scaredy-cat and one sweet-but-dumb younger boy kitty

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    • #3
      Thanks for this! I'm adding the book to my reading list. I'm a total financial dummy and DH handles all the finances/bill paying. It's just the way the division of labor worked out. Even though he does a great job my lack of involvement has been weighing on my mind ... totally morbid but I'd be so screwed if anything happened to him. I know I need to be more aware of what is going where and how I can help maximize savings and investments. It just seems so daunting and I didn't know where to start. Sounds like this may be just the book for me.

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      • #4
        Originally posted by poky View Post
        I haven't read that one, and I've always been the one to keep track of the money (so no shame about where we are and what I don't know), but I also like Suze's style, and her advice always makes a ton of sense. This thread reminds me that I need to start looking into various insurances, too.
        Yay for being on top of things! We don't have any debt but I know how overwhelming it can be to have expenses get out of hand. I have a friend who has really turned her family's spending around to tackle their credit card problem: reigning in spending, getting a part-time job to increase cash flow, ruling the household budget with an iron fist and steadily paying down the debt -- but then an unexpected expense came up and it's going to be tough to cover, so she's hitting a shame spiral of "why have I done a crappy job with my finances?" She's just one example I've run across of someone who needs to stop worrying about blaming herself and just keep moving forward to solve the problem.

        In our case, when I worked I plugged money into my 403(b) and tried not to spend unnecessarily and just put my head in the sand about the rest (including how best to allocate my 403(b) contributions, which I sort of haphazardly distributed through a few different types of assets with a vague idea of "diversity"). Since I haven't been working I've kept tabs on the parts of the budget that I control but haven't concerned myself one bit about the bigger picture. I know the bottom lines of all the accounts and I have access to Quicken, and DH usually clues me in when he makes a bigger decision, but I haven't really felt adequate to giving my input. Part of me says that DH is better with the money because he knows something I don't know, but down deep -- and Suze reaffirms this -- I know that it's just a matter of being willing to dive in and figure it out for yourself no matter when or where you start. There's no "personal finance 101" that I missed, I just need to get involved. So we've had some really good talks in the past few weeks about what we want our money to do for us, and I'm so proud that I've had the ability to go from his "Could you look into what it would take to get rid of PMI" to launching and following through on a full refinance of our house. Next up, I'm going to work on the allocation of our taxable investment accounts (the ones we keep so that we can start supplementing our income pre-retirement as he phases down his work hours). I'm also going to find a higher-yield savings account for our emergency fund, and an interest-bearing account for our HSA, and I'm probably going to look into funding myself a traditional IRA and converting it to a Roth now that I've learned that there's no income limits on doing so.

        Fun stuff.
        Alison

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        • #5
          Originally posted by Bittersweet View Post
          Thanks for this! I'm adding the book to my reading list. I'm a total financial dummy and DH handles all the finances/bill paying. It's just the way the division of labor worked out. Even though he does a great job my lack of involvement has been weighing on my mind ... totally morbid but I'd be so screwed if anything happened to him. I know I need to be more aware of what is going where and how I can help maximize savings and investments. It just seems so daunting and I didn't know where to start. Sounds like this may be just the book for me.
          I'm right there with you, and yes, I think this is the book for you! (Complete with the totally morbid thoughts -- you HAVE to think that way, for your own sake and for your kiddo.)
          Alison

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          • #6
            I agree, Suze Orman is a great resource, and I gave that Women & Money book to my SO for Christmas... of course she doesn't even have time to read it!! The thing is, I have very little money, but I'm good at managing what I do have - budgeting, saving, finding deals, keeping track of expenses, etc. My SO has a lot of money (relatively speaking) but doesn't know what to do with it and kind of ignores it!

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