Get A Financial Life: Personal Finance In Your Twenties and Thirties by Beth Kobliner. New York: Simon and Shuster, 1996. 283 pp. $12.00.
Trying to be financially savvy can be an uphill battle. For instance, did you hear about the guy who was driving into the city to renew his auto insurance? He was on his cellular phone, trying to get a better deal, when a woman opened her car door in his path, and he collided with it. You can just imagine the conversation with the person at the insurance company: “Hello, could you please give me a quote for insuring my car … CRASH!! …. oh, doesn’t matter. Goodbye.” Well, don’t worry; there are easier ways, including reading the New York Times Bestseller, Get a Financial Life.
The author, Beth Kobliner, has been a writer for Money magazine since 1988. Before that, she researched and wrote more than one hundred articles for Sylvia Porter, a financial journalist, whose column appeared in 150 newspapers nationwide. The author has had numerous television appearances on CBS, NBC, CNN and CNBC as a financial expert. In 1994 and 1995 she was selected by TJFR, the leading trade publication for financial journalists, as one of the country’s most promising financial journalists under the age of thirty. Kobliner graduated from Brown University in 1986 and currently lives with her husband and child in New York City.
Writing about how to manage and maximize our financial resources in a common sense, readable way without getting bogged down in the intricacies of each topic is not easy. The author has succeeded in doing that and a number of prominent financial experts have endorsed the information Kobliner provides her readers. The topics she tackles are taking stock of your financial life, debt, basic banking, investing, retirement planning, home buying, insurance (health, auto, disability, home, and life) and taxation. Kobliner does a good job of viewing each topic through her readers’ eyes. She even injects her personality and sense of humor into the book. That makes it easy to read as well as useful.
Get a Financial Life is a god-send for men and women in their twenties who have completed college, are embarking on independent lives, and are faced with having to make decisions quickly about a confusing array of complicated financial options. For people a little older who have already had to confront decisions about insurance, mortgages, credit cards, and taxation, some of Kobliner’s information will already be familiar. However, even this latter group will no doubt learn things about most topics. Kobliner’s book can help everyone see their financial life as a total package, and that can be an important first step toward making necessary changes or revisions. There are also resources for further exploration for those seeking more depth on particular issues.
The book has the potential to be useful to couples in other ways, too, though Kobliner may not have intended it this way. As any number of surveys shows, money is one of the biggest sources of tension between spouses. When couples have different values about how to acquire and what to do with their financial resources emotions can run high. Get a Financial Life makes no promises to improve our compatibility with regard to financial values. But it does offer us some sensible guidelines for managing the family resources. Becoming well informed on this subject enables us to distinguish between conflict of values and disagreement over financial strategies, thereby avoiding heated arguments about the wrong topic.