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
PERSPECTIVES
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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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