FLA Publishing
$14.95
Nate Hardcastle for Mainebiz
Reprinted with permission from Mainebiz
Leslie Linfield is on a mission. "Financial illiteracy is at an all-time high," she insists. She points out that the number of personal bankruptcies recently hit record levels, while savings rates languish at an all-time low. Linfield, executive director of Portland's Institute for Financial Literacy, wrote Budget! to fight that trend. "Americans are struggling with personal financial management," she says. "Education is a tool to combat that problem."
Linfield's 20-year career has spanned the personal finance industry, and includes tenures as a banker, stock broker, housing counselor, credit counselor and lawyer. She repeatedly has found herself frustrated with publications that exhort their readership to budget without explaining the nuts and bolts of the budgeting process. "Authors always tell readers that they need a budget – but they never tell them how to do one," she says. "Someone needed to create a how-to manual."
Budget! fits that description. The book details a simple, methodical process for tracking and projecting expenditures and income, and then adjusting as needed. Linfield also offers scores of money saving suggestions designed to help readers get their budgets in balance. And she provides context with information about average American expenditures: Did you know the typical American family spends roughly $175 per person on food every month? Or that you can expect to spend an average of 5.2 cents on auto maintenance per mile driven? Budget! dovetails with a website, budget4.com, from which readers can download budgeting forms and obtain other information.
The book's final two chapters explain how and why to calculate your net worth, and how to go about setting positive financial goals. "I want folks to learn how to use their budget and net-worth analysis as a tool to accomplish whatever goals are important to them," says Linfield.
She thinks helping people get a handle on their finances can have far-reaching repercussions. "Financial conflict is the number-one cause of divorce," she notes. "And personal financial problems typically spill into all sorts of other areas. They cause emotional, psychological and health issues – things that don't just hurt individuals and families, but also cost employers money in productivity and time."
Linfield hopes her book can spread the message of the benefits of financial prudence to a far broader audience than she can reach through the Institute for Financial Literacy. She realizes that any book on budgeting runs the risk of preaching exclusively to the converted, however. She writes in the book's introduction, "[P]eople find the word ‘budget' offensive, and few words create the same sense of dread. We've come to associate ‘budget' with sacrifice, denial of gratification, and burdensome attention to detail."
Linfield thus goes to great pains to make the book user-friendly. She writes conversationally, sprinkling the manual with liberal doses of humor and personal anecdotes. The book's clean layout is approachable almost to the point of being elementary, with wide margins, numerous bullet points and generous type size.
Ultimately, Linfield hopes to show people that they are on a budget whether they know it or not – and that it's in their best interest to start paying attention. "Budgets are like diets," she says. "We all have them. Budgeting is just the process of understanding what's coming in and what's going out."