July 25 2019

Top 10 Money Books I’ve Read

I’m just going to say it. I’m sure most of you have realized this by now anyway. I am a woman of a certain age. I am a proud member of the over fifty club, and as such, I hope to be financially able to stop working in the not so distant future if I so desire. I am spending more of my time thinking about ways to earn extra money. The actual goal is that by the time Hubby turns sixty, we will have hit the magic number that only he seems to know that will mean we can afford to retire. So, in roughly four years, I hope to have learned to invest well enough to earn a million dollars and be able to afford to retire. I also want to have a job I enjoy so much that I won’t actually want to retire, but instead keep working and add to the nest egg so we can afford to be generous with our time and/or money when we actually do stop working full time for a paycheck.
In the past couple of years I have had money on the brain. I didn’t realize how bad it had gotten until I was browsing through Goodreads at the books I have read so far in 2019 and those I read in 2018. So I decided to make a list of the top ten books I have read about money for you today. Just so you know, the links for books below are affiliate links, because, like I said, I have spent a lot of time thinking about ways I could possibly earn some extra money. It hasn’t worked so far, but you never know.
1) Invested: How Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger Taught Me to Master My Mind, My Emotions, and My Money (with a Little Help from My Dad) by Danielle Town (and Phil Town)
2) Retire Inspired: It’s Not an Age, It’s a Financial Number by Chris Hogan
3) Get Money: Live the Life You Want, Not Just the Life You Can Afford by Kristin Wong
4) Rule #1: The Simple Strategy for Successful Investing in Only 15 Minutes a Week! by Phil Town
5) Total Money Makeover by Dave Ramsey
6) Everyday Millionaire by Chris Hogan
7) Refinery29 Money Diaries: Everything You’ve Ever Wanted To Know About Your Finances… And Everyone Else’s by Lindsey Stanberry
8) Fight for Your Money: How to Stop Getting Ripped Off and Save a Fortune by David Bach
9) Profit Sharing: The Chapman Guide to Making Money an Asset in Your Marriage by Gary Chapman
10) You Are a Badass at Making Money: Master the Mindset of Wealth by Jen Sincero
11) The $100 Startup: Reinvent the Way You Make a Living, Do What You Love, and Create a New Future by Chris Guillebeau
Just because I couldn’t decide which book to cut from the list to make it just ten, you get a bonus book.
This post is part of the weekly Five Minute Friday link-up!
The prompt this week is: Distant
The assignment: Write for five minutes on the word of the week. This is meant to be a free write, which means: no editing, no over-thinking, no worrying about perfect grammar or punctuation. Just write.
Because I am a visual person, and really like to see the covers of books before I read them, enjoy the affiliate linked covers to the eleven books listed about. I really enjoyed reading all of them and learned different things from each one. If you were going to read just one of them, I would recommend it be Invested, because it just might change your life. If you have a money related book that you think I should read, please leave your recommendations in the comments below.

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Category: Five Minute Friday, Goals, Money Saving, Reading | Comments Off on Top 10 Money Books I’ve Read
June 6 2019

My Top Tip for Raising Smart Kids

One day when our tv and internet were out, I had an interesting conversation with the cable guy, and no, his name was not Larry.

He noticed all the books and bookshelves in our house and saw the kids’ tassels on the mantle. He says you must have really smart kids. Well, yeah! I wouldn’t have it any other way. My mom-side kicked in and I began telling him about how important it is to read to your kids and let them see you reading for pleasure. Newspapers, magazines, books, cereal boxes, comic books, it really doesn’t matter. As long as you choose to read and they see you enjoy it, they will imitate you.

There was a time when I didn’t think kid #2 was going to be a reader and it kinda freaked me out. She seemed a little distracted when we were reading a book to her and was more into drawing and artsy stuff, even as a preschooler. We just kept reading with her and to her and eventually, she was lured to the bright side with the rest of us. Now the entire family reads voraciously. Or at least we all did while we were living under the same roof. To be fair the kids are grown-up adults and rarely pay attention to us old folks anymore, so I really have no idea what they do in their free time now. Some things are probably better not known.

But seriously, it made all the difference in the kids’ success in school. Readers are succeeders!

Readers are succeeders! Click To Tweet

Reading is the top tip I could share with you to help you raise smarter kids. I’m sure there are a ton of boring statistics to back me up here. Fortunately for you, I will not take the time and effort to dig them up and spit them out for you here. I trust you know how to Google and are fully capable of finding the info on your own.

It is never too late, save yourself and get busy, start reading today! If you think you don’t like reading, you just haven’t found the right books yet. Keep looking! Ask friends who have similar likes and dislikes what THEY like to read. Ask the local librarian for recommendations. I bet Google and Siri could even recommend books for you.

 

No excuses! Find a book or something that interests you and start reading!

Category: Family, Parenting, Reading | Comments Off on My Top Tip for Raising Smart Kids
May 7 2019

Opportunity (Five Minute Friday)

This week, I am determined to get the Five Minute Friday post written before the last minute to post it on Thursday. I have been mulling over the prompt for the week since Friday night trying to figure out what I had to say about it. What I came up with is that opportunity is what you make of it.

I am forever telling anyone who will listen what a wonderful thing our local public library is. I have also said for many years that ANYone can learn with a library card in a cardboard box. You don’t need a computer, a fancy place to live and a top-notch school. If you want to learn, you will find a way to do it. There is a free education waiting at the local library and all you need is a library card. Well, that and the ability to read, I suppose. When I think of the thousands of books I have devoured over the years by using my library card and all the money those books would have cost if I had to buy them, I likely could have bought a new car with the money I had saved by checking them out.

It isn’t just books that the library has offered up over the years. When the kids were little, they loved the VHS tape of “Corduroy” the little bear who was found in the department store and taken home by the little girl who loved him. There was also the oh, so useful cassette tape, “Slumberland”, that would put the kids to sleep if they were still awake after their first choice of tape was over. There were music CDs and then movies and whole seasons of tv shows to binge watch on DVDs. Now they offer up free courses online, audiobooks, ebooks, streaming video and so much more. They regularly offer the ability to read entire articles from Consumer Reports to help me do the research needed to decide which major appliance brand and model is the best fit for our home. They offer free classes on more subjects than I could study in a lifetime. They even offer language courses. So you see with something as small as a library card, even if you lived in a cardboard box in an alley somewhere, you have the opportunity to learn as much as you want. They even offer a place to learn to read if that isn’t a skill you already possess. So the opportunity is there, I hope you will take the time to take advantage of all your local library has to offer.

This post is part of the weekly Five Minute Friday link-up!
The prompt this week is: Opportunity
The assignment: Write for five minutes on the word of the week. This is meant to be a free write, which means: no editing, no over-thinking, no worrying about perfect grammar or punctuation. Just write.

Category: Five Minute Friday, Learning, Reading | Comments Off on Opportunity (Five Minute Friday)
May 2 2019

I Read the First 4 Months Away

I have been listening to so many audiobooks as I make my 20-30 minute commute between work and home each day. I use the library’s website to keep a constant stream of audiobooks and ebooks in my wishlist and on my hold list. When I hear or read about a book I want to read, the first thing I do is look for it on Amazon because I have the little add on that then tells me if my library has it in the various formats and gives me a button to click to request it for hold or check it out on the spot in the case of electronic versions.

You might wonder why I bother to look them up on Amazon instead of going straight to the library website to look them up and be done with it. Well, you see I can find them faster because the Amazon search engines are much more forgiving than the library search. Also if the library doesn’t have it then I add it to my wishlist for future reference. The wishlist is not to be confused with the gift list because I am not hoping to be gifted a copy but rather to be able to remember with name and author of the book should I ever need to look for it at a later time. The thing that makes this wonderous search possible is the Library Extension. I highly recommend it and find it very useful. The best thing is that it is FREE!

Please see below the covers of the 52 books I have read so far this year. If you have any recommendations on books you think I should read, feel free to leave them in the comments below or send them to me via email or social media. All the links are in the top right-hand corner of each page on this site.

Karen’s bookshelf: read in 2019

What Matters Most: The Get Your Shit Together Guide to Wills, Money, Insurance, and Life’s “What-ifs”
Draw the Circle: The 40 Day Prayer Challenge
Love, Skip, Jump: Start Living the Adventure of Yes
The Dhandho Investor: The Low-Risk Value Method to High Returns
Check Me Out
Ridiculous Faith: Experience the Power of an Absurdly, Unbelievably Good God
Maybe It's You: Cut the Crap. Face Your Fears. Love Your Life.
The Ghost and Mrs. McClure
The Big Secret for the Small Investor: The Shortest Route to Long-Term Investment Success
Rising Strong
The Battle Plan for Prayer: Attacking Life's Struggles Through Prayer
Scratch: Writers, Money, and the Art of Making a Living
The Shoe Box: A Christmas Story
The Girl with the Lower Back Tattoo
Killing Thyme
Guilty as Cinnamon
Assault and Pepper
Treble at the Jam Fest
Butter Off Dead
It's Okay Not to Be Okay: Moving Forward One Day at a Time
Karen’s favorite books »

 

2019 Reading Challenge

2019 Reading Challenge
Karen has
read 52 books toward
her goal of
100 books.
hide

 

Category: Reading | Comments Off on I Read the First 4 Months Away
September 27 2018

Review: Invested

A couple of months ago, Hubby got a free ebook with his subscription to the Wall Street Journal and the book he chose was Invested: how Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger taught me to master my mind, my emotions, and my money (with a little help from my dad) (2018) by Danielle Town and her father, Phil Town. He was really enjoying reading it and shared some of the things he was learning as he read it. I looked it up on my local library’s website and discovered it actually sounded like something I might also enjoy reading, so I requested the paper copy and the audiobook and waited for them to show up in my account. It didn’t take me long to catch up to him because while he was stopping at the end of each chapter to complete the homework exercises, I was thinking about them but moving forward with the book. I had also gotten copies of Phil Town’s books Rule #1 (2006) and Payback Time (2010) and had read through Rule #1 also.

If you are a total newbie to the investing world, like me, you will love Invested. I really appreciated Danielle’s willingness to share her reluctance to take charge of investing her own money. She also shared her extreme dislike of all things numbers. I found I related to her style of writing much more than Hubby did. He found Phil’s style more to his liking, so maybe it is just a guy thing. If you want to learn how to get started investing for absolute scratch, this is the book for you. It explains how to find great companies that share your values and how to determine their value and what price to buy them at so they are “on sale”. This is called value or values investing and is generally considered to be the style of investing that Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger have used since the 1960s to amass their fortunes.

This book is an excellent read and has given me the confidence to tackle investing on my own. I highly recommend reading or listening to it if you are considering taking over managing your own retirement accounts. The book is meant to be read over the course of a year and is broken down into months with homework assigned each month to help you build the confidence to begin investing your own money. Don’t worry about having real money to invest because at first, you will be practicing by using paper money or paper trading until you get confident enough with your ability to use real money.

If you plan to purchase any of the books mentioned in this post, please consider using the affiliate links provided below by clicking on the book covers. It won’t cost you any extra, I could potentially earn a penny or two and that would really help me out.

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Category: Book Review, Learning, Reading | Comments Off on Review: Invested