Rich on Any Income

Rating:
Summary: I hate this book...
Review: I hate this book (but I hate budgeting even more) and this book is full of the "b" word. Yes, that's right the word b-u-d-g-e-t is evil. Basically theses guys want you to keep track of every single purchase you make over these 25 broad categories and then adjust your spending to live under your means.

The categories are:

Allowances
Automobiles
Cleaning and laundry
Cothing
Contributions
Debt payments
Family Advancements (what the heck is that suppoused to be?)
Gifts
Groceries (shouldn't food be near the top?)
Housing (see above)
Insurance (just buy term - whole life is a rip off)
Investments
Maintanece & improvements
Medical, dental, drugs (no, not the illegal ones)
Miscellaneous, petty cash (why not just send it to me ?)
Recreation & entertainment
Savings
Subscriptions
Utilities
Vacations, trips

Now you tell me, who in the world would really do that every time they purchased something, also why couldn't someone just estimate?

Another thing that I don't like about this book is it is basically a selling tool for their proprietary budget keeping kits that they make it sound like you have to have or you won't be able to budget anything. Come on I'm sure if someone really was interested in budgeting they could use something like Excel.

One more thing, if you just would live within your means (not spend more than you earn - a good way to do this is to just use cash and not use credit cards) and you wouldn't have to budget anything.

Reed Floren

Rating:
Summary: I really liked this book
Review: Obviously the previous review was biased against budgeting in general. Budgeting is hard, it requires discipline... especially for those of us who struggle to make ends meet. Its not as easy as the previous reviewer seems to think... sound principles and good tools are required to get your financial life in order.

I really liked this book. It teaches sound principles and is a very easy read. The methods taught are manual and require discipline to implement, but if you stick to the program it will get you on top of your finances. You dont need to buy his tools to implement the principles, but for the non-computer savvy folks, this is a very good method of tracking your categories.