A concise, informative, action-oriented approach to Personal Financial Management. This book begins with a baseline assessment of an individual's financial position. This includes a detailed explanation of what net worth is, and how it is calculated. The discussion moves on to financial goal setting. To facilitate that process, we've provided a financial goals worksheet as shown below. You can click on the snippet, to download the full worksheet. It's not enough to want to pay off debt and build savings... financial goals need to be clearly defined and measurable.
The focus then shifts to building a budget that incorporates your current financial reality and your goals for the future. In traditional budgeting, line-item amounts are fixed each month. Since fixed monthly budgets don't work for most people, this author takes a different approach. She advocates the use of variable monthly budgets to capture regular and irregular income and expense items. Those monthly budgets are then reconciled into an annual budget. This approach is extended to income and expense tracking, to facilitate a meaningful budget to actual comparison. The reader is then stepped thru the process of reviewing, re-evaluating, and revising the financial plan, based on real life circumstances.
As a certified public accountant, this author couldn't talk about personal finance without talking about income taxes. The tax topics include an explanation of tax brackets, tax withholding, estimated tax payments, self-employment tax, deferred taxes on certain retirement plan contributions, tax credits and tax deductions.
In the final chapter the author touches on the financial considerations for home buying, data security in the information technology age, and general rules for everyday money decisions. This book delivers a lot of material in a concise and informative manner; without extra verbiage or unnecessary redundancy.
The primary objective is to promote financial literacy by actively engaging the reader in the process. To that end, the NetWorth2B website is a perfect complement. Here you can find a net worth calculator, a goal worksheet, budget worksheet, a debt payoff calculator, a mortgage payoff calculator, a savings calculator, and a host of other online resources. These tools can help the reader work through different scenarios, based on recommendations given in this book. It's a practical guide to personal financial management with an emphasis on measuring, monitoring, and impacting changes in Net Worth.
