the owl and the olive tree

(Side note: these are numbered according to when I get around to blogging them, not according to when I finish them.)

I don't have anything extensive to say about these -- which is why I didn't get around to blogging them until now, even though I read them in late January, and why I'm rounding them up and reviewing them in brief paragraphs. I periodically go through a kick of reading personal finance books, not because I expect them to teach me anything new, but sort of for... moral support, I guess, when I'm making financial resolutions. (Because, yeah, they all say 'spend less than you make, try not to go too deeply into debt, sock some money away in case the car explodes or you lose your job, it would be nice to retire someday,' all of which I do actually know.) Uh, yeah. That embarrassing revelation aside....

Women & Money: Owning the Power to Control Your Destiny, by Suze Orman

Didn't really teach me anything new. Spent a lot of time on setting up a living trust and will and so on. Lots of stuff about how many women don't know anything about their own finances (ie, they let their husband handle everything), which is a bad idea, which I agree with but didn't need to be told. Some stuff about saying a firm but kind 'no' that I probably do need but not in the realm of money (as I do not -- knock wood -- have relatives asking me for money). Pretty par-for-the-course: regular personal finance advice, plus 'don't just let your husband handle everything and leave you in the dark.' (Got it free from when the Oprah site was giving it away, actually.)

Why Smart People Make Big Money Mistakes And How To Correct Them: Lessons From The New Science Of Behavioral Economics, by Gary Belsky and Thomas Gilovich

This was the most interesting of the lot, because it actually wasn't just 'don't spend more money than you make you idiot.' It was about -- well, a lot of ways that people think about money that seem sensible from the inside but that don't actually make all that much sense. Loss aversion and the sunk cost fallacy, "mental accounting" that actually hurts you (like keeping an inheritance in a safe, low-interest savings account, while racking up interest on high-interest debt), why peoples' sense of scale goes wonky when the numbers get big, and so on. It really was interesting, and I'd give it a bigger write-up, except that it's really just a specific example case of a lot of the ideas in Gilovich's other book How We Know What Isn't So, and I'll save my full write-up for that.

Spend Well, Live Rich: How to Get What You Want with the Money You Have, by Michelle Singletary

Really standard personal finance -- just straight-up cheerleading of stuff that I already knew. Fast read, entertaining enough (I like Michelle Singletary's style; I listen to her NPR podcast), nothing new. Some thrift tips. Successful for the cheerleading purposes, though.

So, yeah. Useful cheerleading. Not sure I'd recommend them otherwise.

(Note to self: books I finished and still need to write up:

The Omnivore's Dilemma, by Michael Pollan
The Final Days, by Woodward and Bernstein
The Wordy Shipmates, by Sarah Vowell
The White Tiger, by Aravind Adiga
How We Know What Isn't So, by Thomas Gilovich)

I have a bunch of fiction coming to me, which is good! I'm ready for some more fantasy/science fiction.