BUDGETING

A bare-bones guide to budgeting basics.

Demystifying and demonstrating financial concepts to teenagers requires honest dialogue about how money works. This book’s first chapters explain the importance of financial literacy and budgeting in clear terms that are broken up across bite-size blocks of text. The accessible layout helps readers who may feel overwhelmed by walls of prose, and handy recap pages reinforce key concepts. The meaningful nuggets of wisdom include mindful budgeting, thriftful spending, and establishing long-term goals. The author endorses useful apps and websites, including You Need a Budget and Credit Karma. However, some of the advice stops short of providing the specific details that teens deserve: Eason expresses great confidence in their tech savviness, but these skills may not help anyone unfamiliar with navigating banking sites. The book closes with a look ahead to “budgeting as a fully-fledged adult,” with a brief overview of rent, mortgages, further education, taxes, pensions, and more. Due to the work’s brevity, many important topics go unaddressed; “rate of interest” is defined, but there’s no mention of dividends or compound interest, which could help teens understand potent motivations for building their own savings accounts. Unfortunately, the cast of diverse teens pictured staring into their credit cards, calculators, and phones could find more relevant and comprehensive information elsewhere.

An adequate starting point that falls short of a complete journey.