The Smart Cookies' Guide to Making More Dough and Getting Out of Debt How Five Young Women Got Smart, Formed a Money Group, and Took Control of Their Finances

by Unknown

• ISBN13: 9780385342476
• ISBN10: 0385342470
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-08-25
• Publisher: Delta

Summary

Now more than ever it's crucial to eliminate debt, spend smarter, save better, and achieve financial freedomwithout sacrificing your social life or your sanity! Let The Smart Cookies show you how.... They were five dynamic young women: smart, successfuland secretly drowning in debt. In one year Andrea, Angela, Katie, Robyn, and Sandra dramatically improved their financial situations. Their proven recipe for success has since been featured onThe Oprah Winfrey Show,theTodayshow, MSNBC, and in theNew York Daily News. How did they do it? The five womenwith varied careers in marketing, public relations, social work, and real estatejoined forces to create a fun, simple,effectivestrategy for achieving financial success, forming a money group and supporting one another every step of the way. Now, in this extraordinary hands-on guide, The Smart Cookies tackle the unique financial challenges facing women today as they share the secrets of their extraordinary success. Learn how to: Save money and still make room for "guilt-free spending" Have a Girls Night In once a weekand save hundreds each year Splurge on big-ticket itemswithout breaking the bank Invest like a proin just a few short lessons Get paid what you're worthstep-by-step instructions for negotiating the best raise Discover easy ways to cut costswithout feeling the pinch And much, much more!

Author Biography

The Smart Cookies have been meeting since March 2006. As five fabulous women who appeared to have it all, each shared a major financial problem she was hesitant to reveal. When The Smart Cookies created the money club, they barely knew one another but today have become close, committed friends and business partners. With support, accountability, and simple strategies for attracting more money, they managed to turn their financial picture around in under a year. Andrea, Angela, Katie, Robyn, and Sandra reside in Vancouver, British Columbia. They are passionate about helping women everywhere start money clubs and begin talking about money.

Jennifer Barrett has written about financial issues for the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and Newsweek, where she is currently a general editor. She lives in New York City with her husband, Victor Ozols, and their son.


From the Hardcover edition.

Excerpts

Chapter One

The Taboo Topic

Starting the Conversation about Money


Money.

How often have you said the word aloud? How often do you talk about it with your friends, your family, or your colleagues at work? Do you know your best friend’s credit-card balance? Or how much your parents owe on their mortgage? Have you ever asked your colleagues how they manage their money?

Probably not. To do so would seem almost as intrusive as asking about their bedroom activities, right? Or worse! In fact, we’re probably more likely to share stories of our sexual exploits than to divulge details about our paychecks or credit-card statements with our friends and family.

Money is ever-present in our lives. We use it daily and can’t survive without it, yet women hardly ever talk about it with each other. We’ve been conditioned to believe that it’s impolite to ask how much money someone makes, or how much they paid for their home, and distasteful to disclose how much we earn from our investments. We’re discouraged from discussing how much money we have, and we worry about being perceived as greedy for wanting to earn more–or, at least, saying so out loud–especially if we have a job that we love. (The Smart Cookies definitely donotsubscribe to this belief. It’s one of many myths about money we’ll discuss in this book that keep women from earning what we’re worth.)

You probably have no problem telling your girlfriends about the great deal you got on that Isaac Mizrahi dress at Target. But have you ever compared earnings or investment strategies over cocktails?

Until we formed the Smart Cookies Money Group, we hadn’t either. In fact, we would consciously keep from talking about how much money we had, made, or owed, to avoid making anyone uncomfortable, including ourselves. Instead, we’d steer the conversation toward more neutral topics like dating or shopping or the last great book we read. We didn’t want to find out that our friends were making a lot more than we were or to admit that our paychecks weren’t as big as we wished they were. Some of us were embarrassed to disclose how much credit-card debt we had or, worse, to admit that we had no idea what our bank-account or credit-card balances were.

Whatever the reason we gave, we know now that our collective refusal to discuss our money problems only made them worse, and that our explanations were really all just excuses. Do any of these sound familiar?


IF I DON’T ACKNOWLEDGE MY DEBT,
MAYBE IT WILL GO AWAY

(Robyn)

I used to live by the motto “ignorance is bliss” when it came to money: If I didn’t think or talk about my growing debt, I thought, I wouldn’t have to worry about it. Of course, I knew deep down that it was there. But I figured I’d pay it off at some point. In the meantime, I just didn’t want to stress out about it. So I avoided looking at my ATM receipts and credit-card statements. I rarely even kept track of my bank balance (it was usually so depressingly low). I regularly went over my checking-account limit and paid extra fees as a result. But if my debit card was declined, I’d just pull out a credit card. That would explain why, at the time I joined the Smart Cookies Money Group, I had nearly $12,000 in debt.


I’M NO GOOD WITH MONEY, SO WHY TALK ABOUT IT?

(Angela)

I didn’t like to discuss money because that would have meant revealing my ignorance on the topic. I remember being so clueless about my finances when we had our first money-group meeting that I actually had to check with my then-boyfriend to find out how much we had in our bank account and what we paid on our mortgage each month. It is awful to admit, but I handed my paychecks over to him every two weeks and he essentially handed m

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Excerpted from The Smart Cookies' Guide to Making More Dough and Getting Out of Debt: How Five Young Women Got Smart, Formed a Money Group, and Took Control of Their Finances by Jennifer Barrett, The Smart Cookies
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