NAKED MONEY MEETINGS

A no-nonsense and comprehensive guide to achieving financial harmony.

The latest from podcaster, debt adviser, and professional speaker Kelly, the author of Get the Hell Out of Debt (2021), revolves around a central conceit that one should have “a complete willingness to be vulnerable…when it comes to your money…whether you are solo, shacked up, or signed-on-the-dotted-lined.” She presents readers with a barrage of tests they may take in order to assess not only their financial state, but also their financial frame of mind, which she assigns to a particular “block”: the Lack Block (“I tend to react to financial stress instead of anticipating or dissipating it”), the Worthiness Block (“I lack confidence when it comes to money and other areas of my life”), the Stress Block (“I constantly think about money or the lack thereof”), which is probably the most heavily populated block, and a few others. In Kelly’s view, it’s the misalignment between blocks—romantic partners “living” in different financial neighborhoods, as it were—that gives rise to the sort of financial stress she describes in these pages, and she carefully lays out how to bring these neighborhoods together. Her tone throughout is funny and slangy, with pop-culture references and humorous asides, as when she recalls an embarrassing moment involving the 1997 horror film Anaconda while making a point about giving one’s partner space to grow and change. She’s keenly aware that the subject of money is inherently worrying, so she wisely keeps her tone correspondingly light. Nonetheless, there’s a refreshingly hard-edged clarity to much of her advice, and a great deal of it will be useful even to people who aren’t in committed relationships. As she points out, her book isn't meant to defend or attack such commitment but to help readers find a sense of financial peace.

A kindly and crystal-clear program of advice for managing money.