Children are hyper-aware of money, and they have scores of questions about its nuances. But when parents shy away from the topic, they lose a tremendous opportunity—not just to model the basic financial behaviors that are increasingly important for young adults but also to imprint lessons about what the family truly values.Written in a warm, accessible voice, grounded in real-world experience and stories from families with a range of incomes, The Opposite of Spoiled is both a practical guidebook and a values-based philosophy. The foundation of the book is a detailed blueprint for the best ways to handle the basics: the tooth fairy, allowance, chores, charity, saving, birthdays, holidays, cell phones, checking accounts, clothing, cars, part-time jobs, and college tuition. It identifies a set of traits and virtues that embody the opposite of spoiled, and shares how to embrace the topic of money to help parents raise kids who are more generous and less materialistic.But The Opposite of Spoiled is also a promise to our kids that we will make them better with money than we are. It is for all of the parents who know that honest conversations about money with their curious children can help them become more patient and prudent, but who don’t know how and when to start.

    But how can you guide them without resorting to less-than-optimal behavior yourself? Dr. Becky Bailey's unusual and powerful approach to parenting has made thousands of families happier and healthier.Focusing on self-control and confidence-building for both parent and child, Dr. Bailey teaches a series of linked skills to help families move from turmoil to tranquility:7 Powers for Self-Control to help parents model the behavior they want their kids to follow. These lead to:7 Basic Discipline Skills to help children manage sticky situations at home and a t school, which will help your children develop:7 Values for Living, such as integrity, respect, compassion, responsibility, and more.Dr. Bailey integrates these principles in a seven-week program that gets families off to a good start, offering plenty of real-life anecdotes that illustrate her methods at work. With this inspiring and practical book in hand, you'll find new ways of understanding and improving children's behavior, as well as your own.

    Life is expensive. It doesn’t matter if you make $40,000 or $140,000 a year, it can feel like you’re constantly broke. Can you afford that new car, that vacation, that night out? You think so, but it feels impossible to know. And rigid budgets that force you to spend your money in unrealistic ways (like $9.50 per week for pants) don’t make things any clearer.But what if there was a new way to manage your money? One that left you certain you had your bases covered—both for your monthly bills and your future retirement—and then let you enjoy your money by spending it. (Yes, we just said that.)Enter Shannon Lee Simmons, a totally new voice in the world of personal finance, one who understands the new and very real pressures to survive modern life and keep up in the age of social media. Shannon doesn’t lecture, judge or patronize. The founder of the wildly popular New School of Finance, Shannon recognized that most of her thousands of clients felt broke, no matter what their income. And feeling broke can be as bad as actually being broke, because it leads to overspending and misery.Worry-Free Money takes a fresh approach to finances, looking at the root cause of the pressure to spend and showing why traditional budgets don’t work. It is a deeply practical book that will help you break the cycle of guilt, understand why you overspend and find hope—and fun—in getting your money under control.

    If you’re looking for practical information to answer all your “How?” “What?” and “Why?” questions about money, this book is for you. You’ll also learn all about insurance, mortgage options, marketing, bargain hunting and the most important element of all—giving. Now let’s be honest: This is the handbook of Financial Peace University.

    Yet between Mom and Dad working full-time jobs, endless carpooling of overscheduled youngsters, and the never-ending pressures to buy and consume, family life can be incredibly—needlessly—complex. What if you could find a way to spend more time with your children, replace unnecessary activities with meaningful ones, and teach your children an invaluable life lesson in the process? Living Simply with Children offers a realistic blueprint for zeroing in on the pleasures of family life:• How (and why) to live simply and find more time to be with your children• Activities and rituals that bring out the best in every family member• Realistic ways to reclaim your children from corporate America• Helping children of any age deal with peer pressure• Raising kids who care about people and the planet• How to focus on the “good stuff” . . . with less stuffIncluding sections on limiting television, environmentally friendly practices, celebrating the holidays, and tapping into the growing community of families who embrace simplicity, this inspiring guide will show you how to raise children according to your own values—and not those of the consumer culture—as you enjoy both quality and quantity time with your family.

    With The Five Years Before You Retire, you'll hone in on what you need to do in the next five years to maximize your current savings and create a realistic plan for your future. This book guides you through each financial, medical, and familial decision, from taking advantage of the employer match your company offers for your 401k program to enrolling in Medicare to discussing housing options with your family. Covering every aspect of retirement planning, these straightforward strategies explain in detail how you can make the most of your last few years in the workforce and prepare for the future you've always wanted. Whether you just started devising a plan or have been saving since your first job, The Five Years Before You Retire will show you what you need to do now to ensure that you live comfortably for years to come.

    And who could blame them? These so-called millennials have come of age in the wake of the worst economic crisis in memory, and are now trying to get by in its aftermath. They owe record levels of student loan debt, face sky-high rents, and struggle to live on a budget in an uncertain economy. It’s time for them to get a financial life. For two decades, Beth Kobliner’s bestseller has been the financial bible for people in their twenties and thirties. With her down-to-earth style, she has taught them how to get out of debt, learn to save, and invest for their futures. In this completely revised and updated edition, Kobliner shares brand-new insights and concrete, actionable advice geared to help a new generation of readers form healthy financial habits that will last a lifetime. With fresh material that reflects the changing digital world, Get a Financial Life remains an essential tool for young people learning how to manage their money. From tackling taxes to boosting credit scores, Get a Financial Life can show those just starting out how to decrease their debt, avoid common money mistakes, and navigate the world of personal finance in today’s ever-changing landscape.

    Nationally renowned financial advisor and bestselling author David Bach knows that it doesn’t have to be this way. In Smart Couples Finish Rich, he provides couples with easy-to-use tools that cover everything from credit card management, to investment advice, to long-term care. You and your partner will learn how to work together as a team to identify your core values and dreams, creating a financial plan that will allow you to achieve security, provide for your family’s future financial needs, and increase your income. Together, you’ll learn why couples that plan their finances together, stay together!

    How often do these experts pull back the curtain and tell us how they invest their own money? Never. How I Invest My Money changes that. In this unprecedented collection, 25 financial experts share how they navigate markets with their own capital. In this honest rendering of how they invest, save, spend, give, and borrow, this group of portfolio managers, financial advisors, venture capitalists and other experts detail the "how" and the "why" of their investments. They share stories about their childhood, their families, the struggles they face and the aspirations they hold. Sometimes raw, always revealing, these stories detail the indelible relationship between our money and our values. Taken as a whole, these essays powerfully demonstrate that there is no single "right" way to save, spend, and invest. We see a kaleidoscope of perspectives on stocks, bonds, real assets, funds, charity, and other means of achieving the life one desires. With engaging illustrations throughout by Carl Richards, How I Invest My Money inspires readers to think creatively about their financial decisions and how money figures in the broader quest for a contented life. With contributions from: Morgan Housel, Christine Benz, Brian Portnoy, Joshua Brown, Bob Seawright, Carolyn McClanahan, Tyrone Ross, Dasarte Yarnway, Nina O'Neal, Debbie Freeman, Shirl Penney, Ted Seides, Ashby Daniels, Blair duQuesnay, Leighann Miko, Perth Tolle, Josh Rogers, Jenny Harrington, Mike Underhill, Dan Egan, Howard Lindzon, Ryan Krueger, Lazetta Rainey Braxton, Rita Cheng, Alex Chalekian.

    More than once, they’ve begged, “Just tell me what to do.”It’s no surprise that even my most successful friends feel confused or paralyzed. Even if they have a shelfful of personal finance books, they don’t have time to make sense of all the information available. They don’t just want good advice, they want the best advice—so rather than do the “wrong thing,” they do nothing. Their 401(k) and bank statements pile up, unexamined or maybe even unopened.What they don’t realize is that bad calls about money aren’t failures; they’re just what happens when emotional creatures have to make decisions about the future with limited information. What I tell them is that we need to scrap striving for perfection and instead commit to a process of guessing and making adjustments when things go off track. Of course we’re going to make the best guesses we can—but we’re not going to obsess over getting them exactly right.The fact is, in a single page you can prioritize what you really want in life and figure out how to get there. That’s because a great financial plan has nothing to do with what the markets are doing, what your real estate agent is pitching, or the hot stock your brother-in-law told you about. It has everything to do with what’s most important to you. By now you may be wondering, “What about the details? How much do I need to invest each year, and how do I allocate it? How much life insurance do I need?” Don’t worry: I’ll cover those topics and many more, sharing strategies that will take the complexity out of them. The most important thing is getting clarity about the big picture so you can cope with the unexpected. Maybe you’ll lose the job you thought was secure; you’ll take a financial risk that doesn’t pan out; you’ll have twins when you were only budgeting for one. In other words: Life will happen.But no matter what happens, this book will help you bridge the gap between where you are now and where you want to go.

    Traditional retirement advice usually boils down to saving more, sacrificing more, and settling for less. This approach makes people dependent on systems outside their control, such as the market, economy, and investment returns. The result: people lose power over determining their life. What sets Rock Retirement apart is its holistic approach to helping people take back control and act intentionally towards the life they want. It addresses the fears, hopes, and dreams that people have about retirement, goes way beyond the numbers, and shows them how to balance living well today and tomorrow.

    In short: What looks like misbehavior is actually your children’s signal that they’re feeling lost, that they are trying to find direction and looking to you to guide them back on course.   Payne gives parents heartwarming help and encouragement by combining astute observations with sensitive and often funny stories from his long career as a parent educator and a school and family counselor. In accessible language, he explains the relevance of current brain- and child-development studies to day-to-day parenting. Breaking the continuum of childhood into three stages, Payne says that parents need to play three different roles, each corresponding to one of those stages, to help steer children through their emotional growth and inevitable challenging times:   • The Governor, who is comfortably and firmly in charge—setting limits and making decisions for the early years up to around the age of eight • The Gardener, who watches for emotional growth and makes decisions based on careful listening, assisting tweens in making plans that take the whole family’s needs into account • The Guide, who is both a sounding board and moral compass for emerging adults, helping teens build a sense of their life’s direction as a way to influence healthy decision making   Practical and rooted in common sense, The Soul of Discipline gives parents permission to be warm and nurturing but also calm and firm (not overreactive). It gives clear, doable strategies to get things back on track for parents who sense that their children’s behavior has fallen into a troubling pattern. And best of all, it provides healthy direction to the entire family so parents can spend less time and energy on outmoded, punitive discipline and more on connecting with and enjoying their kids.Advance praise for The Soul of Discipline   “The Soul of Discipline offers practical tools for helping parents implement discipline that’s respectful and effective, but the book is so much more. Kim John Payne offers a framework to guide parents in making decisions about why, when, and how to hold tighter reins as we build skills in our children, and why, when, and how to loosen the reins as we scaffold freedom.”—Tina Payne Bryson, Ph.D., co-author of No-Drama Discipline   “This book gets deep inside the challenge of getting along with children and teens and thinks deeply about what they need from us to become strong and self-managing. It elevates discipline to what it should be—a caring process of helping kids orient to the world and live in it happily and well.”—Steve Biddulph, author of The New Manhood   “Kim Payne provides a useful model for choosing our parenting stance—Governor, Gardener, or Guide—depending on the situation. Most powerfully, Payne begins with the radical view that children are not disobedient but rather disoriented. The upshot of this shift in perspective is that discipline is about helping children orient themselves effectively, not about controlling or chastising.”—Lawrence J. Cohen, Ph.D., author of Playful ParentingFrom the Hardcover edition.

    Money Magic offers a clear path to a richer, happier, and safer financial life. Whether you’re making education, career, marriage, lifestyle, housing, investment, retirement, or Social Security decisions, Kotlikoff provides a clear framework for readers of all ages and income levels to learn tricks like:How to choose a career to maximize your lifetime earnings (hint: you may want to consider picking up a plunger instead of a stethoscope).How to buy a superior education on the cheap and graduate debt-free.Why it’s smarter to cash out your IRA to pay off your mortgage.Why delaying retirement for two years can reap dividends and how to lower your average lifetime tax bracket.    Money Magic’s most powerful act is transforming your financial thinking, explaining not just what to do, but why to do it. Get ready to discover the economics approach to financial planning—the fruit of a century’s worth of research by thousands of cloistered economic wizards whose now-accessible collective findings turn conventional financial advice on its head. Kotlikoff uses his soft heart, hard nose, dry wit, and flashing wand to cast a powerful spell, leaving you eager to accomplish what you formerly dreaded: financial planning.

    With her signature mix of insight, compassion, and soul-deep recognition, she equips women with the financial knowledge and emotional awareness to overcome the blocks that have kept them from making more out of the money they make. At the center of the book is The Save Yourself Plan--a streamlined, five-month program that delivers genuine long-term financial security. But what's at stake is far bigger than money itself: It's about every woman's sense of who she is and what she deserves, and why it all begins with the decision to save yourself. Join the Movement to Save Yourself with this Unprecedented Offer to Readers of Women & Money: Suze Orman believes that having an account of your own is the cornerstone of long-term financial security, and so she has begun a national movement called Save Yourself to turn this wish--that every woman have an account in her own name--into a reality. She is joined in this crusade by the financial brokerage firm TD Ameritrade, which has come up with an extraordinary offer for readers of WOMEN & MONEY. Follow Suze's Save Yourself Plan and open an account in your name with TD Ameritrade. Commit to an automatic deposit of at least $50 per month for twelve consecutive months, and TD Ameritrade will provide the incentive in the form of a $100 deposit into your account in the thirteenth month. In other words, you save $600 or more over the course of a year, and TD Ameritrade will reward that effort with a $100 bonus. Learn more inside the book or at www.saveyourself.com.Offer valid for one new TD AMERITRADE account (non-retirement) opened between 2/27/07 and 3/31/08, and funded by 12 monthly consecutive automatic electronic deposits of $50 or more. First $50 must be deposited within 30 days of opening account. To be eligible, you must be a U.S. resident aged 18 or older. See www.saveyourself.com for obligations and limitations and to accept this offer. This is not an offer or solicitation in any jurisdiction where TD AMERITRADE is not authorized to do business. Random House, Inc., does not endorse, is not associated with, and has no responsibility for the TD AMERITRADE offer. TD AMERITRADE, Random House, Inc., and Suze Orman are separate and not affiliated, and each of them is not responsible for the services and information provided by the other(s). TD AMERITRADE, Inc., member NASD/SIPC.

    This expert, one-of-a-kind handbook shows you how to:Ensure that your inheritance instructions will he carried out -- the way you want them to beProtect your child's inheritance from creditors, ex-spouses, addictions, tax troubles, mismanagement, squandering, and other risks of lossPrevent family conflict that can arise when parents die and children divide the "family money"Leave more money to your children and grandchildren, and less to the IRS -- and understand the hidden cost of a "death tax" repeal