FINANCIALLY CAPABLE

Financial educator and public speaker Paradise offers a primer on offbeat ways to understand personal finance and employ methods to improve one’s monetary habits.

Throughout his nonfiction debut, the author stresses that his financial advice has been hard-earned. As a 19-year-old high school dropout with a criminal record for drug-dealing, he says he lived on very little; he rode his bike to his job selling furniture and came home to sleep on the floor (“I couldn’t reduce my expenses much further,” he understates). It’s for this reason that he’s come to consider that money is about much more than math and how it can sometimes be subjective: “We can all agree that 1 plus 1 equals 2. That’s easy,” he writes. “However, if we ask five people, ‘What’s the best thing to do with two dollars?’ we'll get at least six different opinions.” In these pages, Paradise discusses a wide range of the best things to do with one’s dollars, touching on everything from the possible perils of retiring early—basically, that you could outlive your money—to the workings of credit cards compared to debit cards: “Some well-known personalities recommend avoiding debt and credit altogether,” he warns. “That advice is foolish and even reckless.” Paradise’s highly relatable, conversational style results in a winningly approachable guide to personal finance, and it’s one that will be especially useful to people who are starting with very little money, as he himself did. He’s particularly bullish on investing—broad stock market index mutual funds, electronically traded funds, index-tracking funds, plain old real estate, and so on—but he consistently warns his readers that although the best investments are always personal, they should be undertaken with rational intellect, not impulsive emotion. His common-sense approach is such that when he writes, “Dream big, persist, and you will shine brighter than you ever thought possible,” readers will believe him.

A knowledgeable and upbeat overview of everyday money matters.