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Reviewed by Si Ning Yeoh for Readers' Favorite
Money Smart: How Not to Buy Cat Food When You Don’t Have a Cat is a fun personal finance guide by Mary C. Kelly. Money Smart is relatively short and easily digestible, but still manages to pack a fair amount of useful information within its pages. Through this book, readers will learn the basics of making good decisions about money, which is a skill everybody unarguably sorely needs. While it's ostensibly aimed at 18 to 30-year-olds, I feel that it’d be a suitable book for readers of any age who need to brush up on their personal finance knowledge.
Despite having read many excellent personal finance management books prior to this, I fully enjoyed Money Smart and found it to have a unique flavor of its own. Kelly takes what many would consider to be a dull subject and livens it up with droll anecdotes, cute illustrations and an easygoing tone. While the relevant topics (it should be noted, however, that some chapters, especially those dealing with retirement accounts and credit scores, are less relevant to non-American readers) that Mary Kelly explores are, for the most part, nothing new - good vs bad debt, life insurance, spending plans, etc - Money Smart managed to surprise me with the novel twists in some of the personal finance management strategies suggested. Reading about the idea of depositing all of my income into a savings account, for example, and then having the savings account automatically transfer a monthly budgeted amount into my checking account made me smack myself and question why I never thought of something so simple, yet financially sensible before. I also appreciated the links provided to additional resources on this topic; many look to be highly promising resources that I’ll want to follow up on in the near future. All in all, I definitely liked Money Smart and found it a good read.
