A brisk and authoritative financial blueprint for beginners.
Financial adviser Panik offers a comprehensive action plan for gaining financial literacy.
When it comes to making personal-finance plans, simply “hoping for the best won’t work,” the author says early on in this guide. What’s required, he says, is a clear blueprint for building a solid financial foundation. Panik aims much of his advice about planning a financial future at readers who are on the younger side, like he was when he entered the military as a method for student-loan forgiveness and received a crash course in financial responsibility. Over the course of this book, Panik breaks down what he’s learned about the basics of money management, from sensible budgeting and managing debt to the elements of banking and taxation. In short chapters, broken into many segments with numbered lists, he goes into detail about all kinds of financial subjects that younger readers need to know—especially those who may be encountering all these things for the first time. He discusses the arcana of loan repayment, for instance (including income-contingent repayment plans), and home loans, always stressing the need to deal with the details—even when they’re boring: “We may not always see it as a fun part of the process,” Panik writes, “but taking the time to understand the details is key to success.” In scenario after scenario, he illustrates the advantages and disadvantages of basic approaches to monetary challenges, as when he advises younger readers to build their credit rating by acquiring a secured credit card.
Panik’s tone throughout is both encouraging and firmly realistic. He resolutely maintains that his readers can take advantage of even highly complicated financial options, and while he lays out their possibilities, he also lays out their realities, such as that it’s “unrealistic to think that managing current credit card debt, buying a car and buying a home can happen at the same time.” His hypothetical situations, which feature fictional characters, help to illuminate such topics as improving a personal credit score or safeguarding financial information from identity theft. The sheer amount of information that the author manages to fit comfortably into this brief work—just over 200 pages—is nothing short of amazing; he even manages to work in miniature history lessons on things such as the United States’ tax system. Readers who are just starting to grapple with life's financial realities will find his explanations helpful. In his practical advice on buying a first car, for example, he once again strikes a pragmatic note, stressing the importance of understanding the buying process and providing 10 steps in extensive detail. (It starts with “The Most Fundamental Step and Tip is to Understand Your Budget First” and concludes with advice to avoid being “blindsided by any surprise transfer costs or other issues” when signing a contract.) Panik avoids doublespeak, and he takes the mystery out of various money matters in ways that even older readers, with some experience in these matters, are sure to find helpful.
A brisk and authoritative financial blueprint for beginners.Pub Date: April 30, 2024
ISBN: 9798891380394
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Amplify Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 12, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.
A thoughtful program for eradicating poverty from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted.
“America’s poverty is not for lack of resources,” writes Desmond. “We lack something else.” That something else is compassion, in part, but it’s also the lack of a social system that insists that everyone pull their weight—and that includes the corporations and wealthy individuals who, the IRS estimates, get away without paying upward of $1 trillion per year. Desmond, who grew up in modest circumstances and suffered poverty in young adulthood, points to the deleterious effects of being poor—among countless others, the precarity of health care and housing (with no meaningful controls on rent), lack of transportation, the constant threat of losing one’s job due to illness, and the need to care for dependent children. It does not help, Desmond adds, that so few working people are represented by unions or that Black Americans, even those who have followed the “three rules” (graduate from high school, get a full-time job, wait until marriage to have children), are far likelier to be poor than their White compatriots. Furthermore, so many full-time jobs are being recast as contracted, fire-at-will gigs, “not a break from the norm as much as an extension of it, a continuation of corporations finding new ways to limit their obligations to workers.” By Desmond’s reckoning, besides amending these conditions, it would not take a miracle to eliminate poverty: about $177 billion, which would help end hunger and homelessness and “make immense headway in driving down the many agonizing correlates of poverty, like violence, sickness, and despair.” These are matters requiring systemic reform, which will in turn require Americans to elect officials who will enact that reform. And all of us, the author urges, must become “poverty abolitionists…refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.” Fortune 500 CEOs won’t like Desmond’s message for rewriting the social contract—which is precisely the point.
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780593239919
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.
A helpful guide to working effectively with people from other cultures.
“The sad truth is that the vast majority of managers who conduct business internationally have little understanding about how culture is impacting their work,” writes Meyer, a professor at INSEAD, an international business school. Yet they face a wider array of work styles than ever before in dealing with clients, suppliers and colleagues from around the world. When is it best to speak or stay quiet? What is the role of the leader in the room? When working with foreign business people, failing to take cultural differences into account can lead to frustration, misunderstanding or worse. Based on research and her experiences teaching cross-cultural behaviors to executive students, the author examines a handful of key areas. Among others, they include communicating (Anglo-Saxons are explicit; Asians communicate implicitly, requiring listeners to read between the lines), developing a sense of trust (Brazilians do it over long lunches), and decision-making (Germans rely on consensus, Americans on one decider). In each area, the author provides a “culture map scale” that positions behaviors in more than 20 countries along a continuum, allowing readers to anticipate the preferences of individuals from a particular country: Do they like direct or indirect negative feedback? Are they rigid or flexible regarding deadlines? Do they favor verbal or written commitments? And so on. Meyer discusses managers who have faced perplexing situations, such as knowledgeable team members who fail to speak up in meetings or Indians who offer a puzzling half-shake, half-nod of the head. Cultural differences—not personality quirks—are the motivating factors behind many behavioral styles. Depending on our cultures, we understand the world in a particular way, find certain arguments persuasive or lacking merit, and consider some ways of making decisions or measuring time natural and others quite strange.
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.Pub Date: May 27, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61039-250-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
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