The Money Therapist

Seal Press (Published 2008)

Written By Marcia Brixey

USA

Review 3 Stars – Good Read

How the blurb describes the book:
Are you afraid to look at your debt or avoid your bank statements because they’re just too depressing? “You can fix your financial woes,” says Marcia Brixey who offers hope, encouragement, and financial peace of mind no matter what your current relationship with money is.

Learn step-by-step how to:

Get out of credit card debt
Create and follow a realistic budget
Get in touch with your spending
Save your money
Safeguard against identity theft
Organise your financial life

“Marcia Brixey spends all her time helping women get their financial houses in order- from the basement, where debts and secrets eat away at the foundations, all the way to the solidly planned roof you want over your head on those rainy, money-challenged days. In The Money Therapist, she guides readers step-by-step in organising their money messes and offers them a wonderful blueprint from economic empowerment.”
- David Bach, author of Smart Women Finish Rich and Automatic Millionaire

“The Money Therapist is fabulous, engaging, and inspiring. It’s chock full of useful information. I highly recommend it for every woman who wishes to be in control of her money.”
- Barbara Stanny, author of Overcoming Underearning, Secrets of Six Figure Women, and Prince Charming Isn’t Coming: How Women Get Smart About Money

“To ensure a healthy financial life, buy this book! The Money Therapist speaks to women of all ages. Read this book, take action, and you will be on your way to financial security. It’s as simple as that.”
- Candace Bahr and Ginita Wall, CPA, CFP co-founder of the Women’s Institute for Financial Education

Mr Home Budget’s Review:
Right on page two the book will hit you over the head with a 2 by 4. And this paragraph alone is enough to scare most women into giving their money situation another look. “You only need to examine a few statistics to understand why it’s important to become educated on financial issues and begin planning your future now. Between raising children and taking care of parents, women lose an average of 14.7 years from the workplace. A woman who’s out of the workforce for just one year must work five years to recover lost income, pension coverage, and promotion opportunities. With the divorce rate holding steady at 50 percent and the average age of widowhood at fifty eight, plus the fact that women live seven to ten years longer than men, the reality is that if you aren’t already, at some point you are likely to become solely responsible for your financial security. According to the 2000 Census, women are more than four times more likely to become widowed than men. And 80 percent of women living in poverty were not poor before their husbands died.” Wow, very confronting!

While the book starts out strong like this, unfortunately it becomes less and less powerful with each chapter. And it seems also to lose the focus on women’s money issues as it progresses and morphs into just a regular family budgeting book which could be equally powerful for both men and women.

It covers all the necessary topics a good budgeting book should cover. However at times, it can give you too many emotional stories, rather than just giving you a good hard dose of the facts. Plus the book really doesn’t give you a good guide on how to budget. It gives you all the reasons about why you should budget, but leaves you up to your own devices to work out how.

Plus the book has letters from the author’s clients from women she has helped in the past. These letters are titled “Profit From Her Story”. For example, one of the ones which stood out: “A year ago in September I put myself on a budget. It was extremely painful. Looking back, I had never, ever lived within my means. So the first two to three months were really hard as I grappled with what I really needed to live on. By January I was doing well – not incurring any more debt and paying off what I had already spent.

But in July, my income declined because of a setback with an unexpected delinquent account in our business. Keeping the business solvent was extremely important, so I reduced my income by $833 a month ($10,000 net annually) to cover the shortfall. Here is the incredible thing. Because I was so diligent about my budget, I was able to handle getting $833 less a month. There was a time when this would have been a disaster. The only impact was that I couldn’t pay down the debt as fast, so I figured with this setback it would take me two years to complete.

Yet by November, with the money I had allocated to debt reduction, I was 100 percent free of consumer debt. In just over one year, I eliminated nearly $15,000 in debt that I had been lugging around! When I first started my budget, it was hard to imagine this day – and how on earth I would ever get this worked out. Now I’ve taken the money I allotted to debt reduction and put it in a savings account.”

However these letters are on nearly every second page. And while some are helpful like the above example, some just seem to be people praising the author. Or just fillers so that she does not have to write so much. And you can become quite bored with them after awhile.

One chapter which really stood out in my mind was chapter nine, “Get prepared for the unexpected.” It talks about wills, insurance and unexpected events which can throw a spanner in the works of your budget. This is one thing which we at Mr Home Budget must stress, and this author has hit the nail on the head with this sort of thinking. A lot of people with no budget or even great budgets forget that life happens. Unfortunately, we are all entered into an invisible lottery of bad stuff and sometimes your number gets pulled. Now you can’t plan for everything. But you can do yourself a favour and plan for a good chunk of things which could go wrong.

The author talks about having a will. She uses a comedic letter to explain why you need one.

To those I love-
While I understand that I have the right to determine who will inherit my property when I die, I have decided to let the courts make that decision for me, even though that might mean that people I never knew or never liked could wind up as my heirs. I also understand that there are perfectly legitimate ways of minimising the estate taxes my loved ones will have to pay. However, because of the government’s generosity to me throughout my lifetime, I have decided to let Uncle Sam take the biggest bite he can. In addition, rather than deciding who should take care of my children, I’ve decided that I’d rather have my family fight about it, and then let the courts just go ahead and appoint anyone they feel like. Finally, I know that as a result of not leaving a will, a significant portion of my assets could be eaten up by lawyer’s bills, and that all of the private details of my financial affairs will be made public.

However the chapter prior to this is about protecting your identity from theft. While this is extremely important, she has stretched what should have been a few pages at the most, to a whole chapter which is quite boring as you read on. While this book is a good read, it’s not great. But there are some extremely powerful ideas in there which may even change your thinking. Unfortunately these ideas are under a lot of puffed up fluff like the continual letters from the author’s clients that you might not get their full impact. However if you get a chance, this would be a good book to put on your to-read list.
 
Pros:
A book which is really aimed at teaching women the pitfalls of money, and how to prepare them for a mutual money relationship.
Reads very easily and is well written.
Makes some excellent points on why women are different compared to men where money is concerned.

Cons:
The author has put in many recommendations from her readers. But there are far too many and they are in an odd colour print which makes them hard to read.
Sometimes you are reading thinking, is this an advert for the author.
Because the book is written from an American perspective, some of the references will not translate so well in Australia.