30-Minute Money Solutions: A Step-by-Step Guide to Managing Your Finances

Foreword

You'd think that managing your own money would be the most elemental of life skills, one we would all master at an early age. You work and are paid money. You spend some and save the rest. You invest some of what you save for higher returns in the future in case you can't work then. It doesn't sound like that difficult a set of skills to develop. Certainly, most of us develop much more complex capabilities for social interaction: how we dress, behave in public, develop a sense of humor, choose friends, maintain relationships, find employment, select a place to live, and so forth. Compared with that, personal finance should be a breeze.

Yet for most people personal finance remains a mystery, leaving far too many of us prone to scams that play on our naïveté. Small wonder—for most of us, the subject of saving and investing wasn't something discussed at home while we were growing up. It most certainly wasn't something taught in our schools. And to compound the problem, the financial services industry seemingly goes out of its way to make the topic impenetrable. What other industry has more needless complexity and more confusing and constantly changing terminology? Did your Fannie Mae ARM get turned into an RMBS or a CMO with a long WAM rated by a NRSRO and sold to a convert/arb shop?

Fortunately, it is possible to cut through the nonsense and forge a sound financial path, even if you're not hip to this week's financial acronym. The basics of personal finance are just that: basic. ...