The Smart Cookies' Guide to Making More Dough and Getting Out of Debt: How Five Young Women Got Smart, Formed a Money Group, and Took Control of Their Finances - Softcover

The Smart Cookies; Barrett, Jennifer

 
9780385342476: The Smart Cookies' Guide to Making More Dough and Getting Out of Debt: How Five Young Women Got Smart, Formed a Money Group, and Took Control of Their Finances
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0385342470 ISBN 13: 9780385342476
Verlag: Delta, 2009

Inhaltsangabe

Now more than ever it’s crucial to get out of debt, spend smarter, save better, and achieve financial freedom—without sacrificing your social life or your sanity!

Let The Smart Cookies show you how.…

They were five dynamic young women: smart, successful—and secretly drowning in debt. In one year Andrea, Angela, Katie, Robyn, and Sandra dramatically improved their financial situations. Their proven recipe for success has since been featured on The Oprah Winfrey Show, the Today show, MSNBC, and in the New York Daily News. 

How did they do it? 

The five women—with varied careers in marketing, public relations, social work, and real estate—joined forces to create a fun, simple, effective strategy for achieving financial success, forming a money group and supporting one another every step of the way. Now, in this extraordinary hands-on guide, The Smart Cookies tackle the unique financial challenges facing women today as they share the secrets of their extraordinary success. Learn how to:

•Save money and still make room for “guilt-free spending” 
•Have a Girls Night In once a week—and save hundreds each year 
•Splurge on big-ticket items—without breaking the bank 
•Invest like a pro—in just a few short lessons 
•Get paid what you’re worth—step-by-step instructions for negotiating the best raise 
•Discover easy ways to cut costs—without feeling the pinch
 
And much, much more!

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

The Smart Cookies have been meeting since March 2006. As five fabulous women who appeared to have it all, each shared a major financial problem she was hesitant to reveal. When The Smart Cookies created the money club, they barely knew one another but today have become close, committed friends and business partners. With support, accountability, and simple strategies for attracting more money, they managed to turn their financial picture around in under a year. Andrea, Angela, Katie, Robyn, and Sandra reside in Vancouver, British Columbia. They are passionate about helping women everywhere start money clubs and begin talking about money.

Jennifer Barrett has written about financial issues for the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and Newsweek, where she is currently a general editor. She lives in New York City with her husband, Victor Ozols, and their son.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter One

The Taboo Topic

Starting the Conversation about Money


Money.

How often have you said the word aloud? How often do you talk about it with your friends, your family, or your colleagues at work? Do you know your best friend’s credit-card balance? Or how much your parents owe on their mortgage? Have you ever asked your colleagues how they manage their money?

Probably not. To do so would seem almost as intrusive as asking about their bedroom activities, right? Or worse! In fact, we’re probably more likely to share stories of our sexual exploits than to divulge details about our paychecks or credit-card statements with our friends and family.

Money is ever-present in our lives. We use it daily and can’t survive without it, yet women hardly ever talk about it with each other. We’ve been conditioned to believe that it’s impolite to ask how much money someone makes, or how much they paid for their home, and distasteful to disclose how much we earn from our investments. We’re discouraged from discussing how much money we have, and we worry about being perceived as greedy for wanting to earn more–or, at least, saying so out loud–especially if we have a job that we love. (The Smart Cookies definitely do not subscribe to this belief. It’s one of many myths about money we’ll discuss in this book that keep women from earning what we’re worth.)

You probably have no problem telling your girlfriends about the great deal you got on that Isaac Mizrahi dress at Target. But have you ever compared earnings or investment strategies over cocktails?

Until we formed the Smart Cookies Money Group, we hadn’t either. In fact, we would consciously keep from talking about how much money we had, made, or owed, to avoid making anyone uncomfortable, including ourselves. Instead, we’d steer the conversation toward more neutral topics like dating or shopping or the last great book we read. We didn’t want to find out that our friends were making a lot more than we were or to admit that our paychecks weren’t as big as we wished they were. Some of us were embarrassed to disclose how much credit-card debt we had or, worse, to admit that we had no idea what our bank-account or credit-card balances were.

Whatever the reason we gave, we know now that our collective refusal to discuss our money problems only made them worse, and that our explanations were really all just excuses. Do any of these sound familiar?


IF I DON’T ACKNOWLEDGE MY DEBT,
MAYBE IT WILL GO AWAY

(Robyn)

I used to live by the motto “ignorance is bliss” when it came to money: If I didn’t think or talk about my growing debt, I thought, I wouldn’t have to worry about it. Of course, I knew deep down that it was there. But I figured I’d pay it off at some point. In the meantime, I just didn’t want to stress out about it. So I avoided looking at my ATM receipts and credit-card statements. I rarely even kept track of my bank balance (it was usually so depressingly low). I regularly went over my checking-account limit and paid extra fees as a result. But if my debit card was declined, I’d just pull out a credit card. That would explain why, at the time I joined the Smart Cookies Money Group, I had nearly $12,000 in debt.


I’M NO GOOD WITH MONEY, SO WHY TALK ABOUT IT?

(Angela)

I didn’t like to discuss money because that would have meant revealing my ignorance on the topic. I remember being so clueless about my finances when we had our first money-group meeting that I actually had to check with my then-boyfriend to find out how much we had in our bank account and what we paid on our mortgage each month. It is awful to admit, but I handed my paychecks over to him every two weeks and he essentially handed me an allowance. At the time it seemed like the right decision. He was good with money, and I thought I wasn’t (something I laugh about now). He liked reviewing our finances, and at the time I’d convinced myself that looking at numbers on a spreadsheet was boring. He told me he had everything under control, and I believed him. I rarely spoke up about our finances because I felt I didn’t have much credibility. The result? I wasn’t even sure where to find any of our financial documents or how much equity in our home I was entitled to claim when we separated.


I DON’T WANT MY COLLEAGUES TO THINK
I CAN’T KEEP UP WITH THEM

(Sandra)

Since my friends and I never talked about how much money we made, I’d assumed that Andrea, with her well-kept hair, Seven jeans, and designer sunglasses, had it all together and wouldn’t relate to my financial problems. Andrea and I both worked at the same company, but I never asked how she afforded her elegant attire. That seemed impolite. I just figured that if she could, I should be able to too. I had been really disciplined when I’d lived at home with my parents, automatically depositing a portion of my paycheck into a savings account. I’d put away nearly $8,000. But saving money became a much bigger challenge once I moved out on my own and was suddenly responsible for covering my room and board and everything else. Within months, I went through the money I had saved up and charged another $2,000 on my credit card, going out and trying to keep up with Andrea and my other well-dressed colleagues. I was shocked (and a little relieved) to learn at our first money-group meeting that Andrea had the most debt of all of us: nearly $18,000.


WHAT WOULD MY FRIENDS SAY IF THEY KNEW
THE TRUTH?

(Andrea)

I felt a lot of pressure to keep up my professional appearance, and I had told myself that I needed to maintain a certain image to be successful in my career. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with looking polished and put together. But for me, that was just an excuse to spend a lot of money I didn’t have on pricey designer clothes and too many dinners out with friends that I wanted but knew I couldn’t really afford. I may have looked like I was wealthy, but I was anything but. I was in such financial straits at the time we formed our group that I had begun avoiding the phone for fear of facing another call from my creditor–or, worse, one from a collection agency. If Sandra had continued trying to keep up with me, she probably would have ended up in the same financial predicament. Of course, until I became a Smart Cookie, I did my best to make sure that no one knew how I’d paid for all those clothes. I was petrified that the people I liked and respected would think I was a failure if they found out how much debt I had accumulated trying to maintain a lifestyle I couldn’t afford.


I DON’T WANT TO STOP SHOPPING!

(Katie)

As a public-relations manager, I was making a lot of money for someone my age, and I figured I deserved a nice wardrobe (“nice” meaning expensive, of course). But I must have known deep down that my spending was a little out of control. I looked forward to my fiancé’s golf outings so I could go shopping and stash away new purchases before he came home. I would scurry around trying to hide the evidence, putting the cut-off tags and shopping bags at the bottom of the trash bin. When he’d ask whether an outfit I’d bought was new, I’d lie and tell him he’d seen it before. Then one afternoon, after I’d bought a $300 pair of True Religion jeans, I forgot to tuck the receipt away in my wallet. My fiancé spotted it and asked if I had really spent this much on yet another pair of jeans. I felt my heart race, and my face grew red. He was flabbergasted...

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Verlag
Delta
Erscheinungsdatum
2009
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0385342470
ISBN 13 
9780385342476
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
272
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
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https://strengholt.nl/en/

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