What’s stopping you
from achieving your financial goals?
In this easy-to-understand guide, Matt Paradise offers new research, valuable resources, and tools and tips to help you manage your money and build a strong foundation for a secure future.
Financially Capable teaches you:
-
How your values, mindset, and behaviors affect your finances
-
How to develop a budget you can actually live with
-
Which financial products and services will help you grow your savings
-
How to avoid predatory loans, scams, fraud, and identity theft
-
Practical tips to help you manage debt and improve your credit score
Financially Capable is Award Winning
"A knowledgeable and upbeat overview of everyday money matters." Kirkus Reviews
"Financial educator and public speaker Paradise offers a primer on offbeat ways to understand personal finance and employ methods to improve one’s monetary habits.
Throughout his nonfiction debut, the author stresses that his financial advice has been hard-earned. As a 19-year-old high school dropout with a criminal record for drug-dealing, he says he lived on very little; he rode his bike to his job selling furniture and came home to sleep on the floor (“I couldn’t reduce my expenses much further,” he understates). It’s for this reason that he’s come to consider that money is about much more than math and how it can sometimes be subjective: “We can all agree that 1 plus 1 equals 2. That’s easy,” he writes. “However, if we ask five people, ‘What’s the best thing to do with two dollars?’ we'll get at least six different opinions.” In these pages, Paradise discusses a wide range of the best things to do with one’s dollars, touching on everything from the possible perils of retiring early—basically, that you could outlive your money—to the workings of credit cards compared to debit cards: “Some well-known personalities recommend avoiding debt and credit altogether,” he warns. “That advice is foolish and even reckless.” Paradise’s highly relatable, conversational style results in a winningly approachable guide to personal finance, and it’s one that will be especially useful to people who are starting with very little money, as he himself did. He’s particularly bullish on investing—broad stock market index mutual funds, electronically traded funds, index-tracking funds, plain old real estate, and so on—but he consistently warns his readers that although the best investments are always personal, they should be undertaken with rational intellect, not impulsive emotion. His common-sense approach is such that when he writes, “Dream big, persist, and you will shine brighter than you ever thought possible,” readers will believe him.
A knowledgeable and upbeat overview of everyday money matters." Kirkus Reviews
"Financially Capable offers a key to understanding financial access and attitudes that influence not only money-making abilities, but personal and financial value. Matt Paradise [expands] the concept of wealth and what makes it valuable. His book explores and explains financial literacy and links financial to life objectives, making it accessible to group discussion and non-financial readers. Its foundation idea of how mindsets, values, and behavior affect financial decision-making and capability is explored in chapters that provide strategies for building both financial security and a rich life.
As Paradise discusses budgeting, money management systems, and common sources of stress, readers receive the opportunity to relate their financial health to the emotional factors that influence decisions and perceptions. Another rare feature of this financial guide is that it acknowledges that disparate interests and ideas of life and wealth affect personal financial planning and health. Financially Capable promotes flexibility alongside knowledge of how money, credit, and financial institutions work. This will, ideally, encourage dialogues and discoveries in book club and group settings where financial issues are of interest. Libraries should recommend Financially Capable to adult patrons [and] young adults.”
— D. Donovan, Senior Reviewer, Midwest Book Review
"Financially Capable helps readers grapple with understanding why they make the decisions they do about money.”
—Tim Ranzetta, Co-founder of Next Gen Personal Finance
"Empathetic and relatable, Financially Capable speaks to the heart of issues faced by young people as they make their way in a complex, confusing, and often predatory financial world.”
—Dr. Sarah Newcomb, Director of Financial Psychology at Morningstar and author of Loaded