I’m pleased to say that the new book, written together with Ann Hutchins, has just been published in the US.
It’s called Finance is Personal: Making your Money Work for You in College and Beyond. It’s available on Amazon in the UK and on the .com site.
Because of the work on the book I’ve not been updating this site as regularly as I should, so a nice thing is that Amazon now has a bit of an author bio of me and links to both books, and the publisher’s website has some nice material on the new book.
Both the new book and the previous one, Taming the Pound, are written in the same style as the site – in other words for the ordinary person who isn’t a financial expert or a psychologist, who wants to control their money and have a better life.
Taming the Pound is written for the general reader in the UK, it covers a lot, the way we think about money, debt, investing, why we’re like we are, talking to a partner about money, explaining money to children, so it’s very comprehensive. As you can see by the reviews on Amazon UK, readers think it is a great book – but the downside is that because it covers so much ground, there is quite a lot of it, so it’s not a book you’ll get through in a single train journey (unless you read fast and go a long way!) But if you do like it, I’d be delighted if you added a review to Amazon.
Finance is Personal is much more focussed. It’s written for the US market, but apart from the spelling (and baseball, rather than cricket, references) the way people think is the same in both countries (and anywhere else come to that). It’s aimed at, for the UK, sixth formers and those going to or at University (in the US, the final years of High-School and going to or at College). Not that other people can’t enjoy it and benefit from it (particularly parents!), but it does deliberately look at the problems of how to “spread your wings” in young adulthood, without landing in a lifetime of debt.
As you’ll see, it’s already had some great endorsements from experts in the fields of finance and psychology, most of whom are professors at major universities and therefore know the problems students (and everybody else) can have with their thinking about money. The publishers are principally a library publisher, so it’s a hardback book, designed to be hardwearing! So if you’d find it interesting but aren’t sure about buying a copy for yourself, get onto your local library and ask them to get a few copies, and or talk to local schools and colleges, because it would be a really useful addition to their libraries. That has the added bonus that, every year, a new class of kids can learn about their finances, without anybody having to fork out for their own copy!
Another way to check out the content of the books is to use the “see inside” option on the Amazon site but to whet your appetite, here’s couple of samples from Taming the Pound as an idea. One is from chapter 3 about changing spending habits. The other is the start of chapter 13, about couple’s finances.