A useful, no-nonsense, and detailed blueprint for rescuing your personal finances.
A debut guide focuses on getting out of debt and increasing personal net worth.
“If you carry consumer debt and you feel trapped in the cycle of minimum payments and maxed out accounts,” writes Kelly in her book, “you are right where the system wants you to be.” Setting aside the old advice of always having six months of rent and expenses in a savings account (and noting how inadequate the pandemic showed that counsel to be), the author seeks in these pages to show her readers some new ways to think about personal finance and the elimination of debt. The recurrent theme running through all her recommendations is the value of knowledge: Readers are urged to review their financial numbers until those figures are familiar rather than intimidating or depressing. “I want you to have comfort and ease with your numbers,” she writes. “But that comes from first getting acquainted with them, and then getting intimate.” Throughout the book, she’s unflinchingly realistic, acknowledging that once her readers have totaled up their entire net worth, they may likely realize they are very, very broke. To address these and other cold realities, Kelly provides a recovery strategy in three phases: planning, paying off consumer debt, and, most importantly, following up these two by investing and building wealth, so as not to fall back into the debt cycle again. The author has been on both sides of the problem she’s describing, having once been over $2 million in debt and having also taught budgeting for many years to clients whose personal finances were a mess. This depth of experience, combined with her friendly, completely encouraging tone, gives her manual an approachability often missing from books of this kind. Readers in all states of financial disrepair will find sound, helpful, and illuminating advice in these pages.
A useful, no-nonsense, and detailed blueprint for rescuing your personal finances.Pub Date: July 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-64-293955-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Post Hill Press
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Some of Avant’s mantras are overstated, but her book is magnanimous, inspiring, and relentlessly optimistic.
Memories and life lessons inspired by the author’s mother, who was murdered in 2021.
“Neither my mother nor I knew that her last text to me would be the words ‘Think you’ll be happy,’ ” Avant writes, "but it is fitting that she left me with a mantra for resiliency.” The author, a filmmaker and former U.S. Ambassador to the Bahamas, begins her first book on the night she learned her mother, Jacqueline Avant, had been fatally shot during a home invasion. “One of my first thoughts,” she writes, “was, ‘Oh God, please don’t let me hate this man. Give me the strength not to hate him.’ ” Daughter of Clarence Avant, known as the “Black Godfather” due to his work as a pioneering music executive, the author describes growing up “in a house that had a revolving door of famous people,” from Ella Fitzgerald to Muhammad Ali. “I don’t take for granted anything I have achieved in my life as a Black American woman,” writes Avant. “And I recognize my unique upbringing…..I was taught to honor our past and pay forward our fruits.” The book, which is occasionally repetitive, includes tributes to her mother from figures like Oprah Winfrey and Bill Clinton, but the narrative core is the author’s direct, faith-based, unwaveringly positive messages to readers—e.g., “I don’t want to carry the sadness and anger I have toward the man who did this to my mother…so I’m worshiping God amid the worst storm imaginable”; "Success and feeling good are contagious. I’m all about positive contagious vibrations!” Avant frequently quotes Bible verses, and the bulk of the text reflects the spirit of her daily prayer “that everything is in divine order.” Imploring readers to practice proactive behavior, she writes, “We have to always find the blessing, to be the blessing.”
Some of Avant’s mantras are overstated, but her book is magnanimous, inspiring, and relentlessly optimistic.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2023
ISBN: 9780063304413
Page Count: 288
Publisher: HarperOne
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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