A valuable blueprint for financial freedom and predictability.
Michalowicz proposes techniques for behavioral modification and structured automation to regain control of finances in this nonfiction guide.
The author offers a brisk, behavior-driven framing of personal finance focused on creating a “Money Habit” by setting up an architecture of accounts, allocations, and automated safeguards. He draws from the psychological insight that people default to “bank balance budgeting” to offer a system meant to work with rather than against human tendencies. It involves creating six core accounts (income, needs, wants, dreams, fix/future, and emergency) to channel cash flow into specific buckets; automated transfers and spreading the accounts between several banks removes temptation and maintains clarity. His central premise is that people can build “cash confidence”—the emotional steadiness that comes from always knowing what funds are for what purpose—and reinforce it through small, frequent transfers that lock in habits and show incremental progress. He illustrates this point with extensive tables and figures. His anecdotal examples of people who use the system are detailed and aspirational enough to be useful but grounded enough to avoid the usual personal-finance mythologizing. Michalowicz’s own narrative arc (a successful business undercut by personal financial chaos was brought back to stability through rigorous habit-based controls) demonstrates the method’s mechanics rather than attempting to inspire through inspirational gloss. The importance of clarity, constraint-through-design, and slow but satisfying incremental wins is emphasized throughout the work. As a money-management guide, the book succeeds powerfully on the terms it sets for itself—its techniques are lucid and repeatable, accompanied by percentages, timelines, and behavioral explanations about savings and investment. Readers already comfortable with basic financial planning and delayed gratification will find it actionable. But the sophistication that makes Michalowicz’s system so elegant may narrow its reach; true beginners, or readers in acute financial crisis, could find it daunting or overly demanding. For the financially literate who have drifted into counterproductive habits, this is an incisive, clarifying, and notably un-gimmicky path back to control.
A valuable blueprint for financial freedom and predictability.Pub Date: Jan. 27, 2026
ISBN: 9781774586433
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Dec. 17, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
IN THE NEWS
IN THE NEWS
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: 288
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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