I am the instructor of a Personal Finance class at a major university and use this book in my classroom. I researched many books on personal finance before settling on this one. It is a comprehensive book which is well laid out, easy to read, and easy to understand. When I chose a book for my students, I intended it to be one which they could use not only in class but to keep as a reference for the future. This book met that requirement. Personal Finance
This book gives a decent, thorough coverage of various topics in financial planning, such as insurance, investing, record keeping, etc. There is a moderate amount of fluff in the book, such as case studies that sound fabricated, and examinations of various commercial products, like credit cards or financial services that read like ads. It's hard not to wonder if the publishers took money from these companies to waste pages talking about their products.
The most important thing to tell you is this: In the back of the book is a personal financial planner you may be asked to fill out for a college course, or you may want to use for your own benefit. If you'd rather not write in the book or rip the pages out, you can download a software version of this planner from the McGraw Hill website. However, this is the crappiest, most buggy, unreliable piece of junk ever. I spent WEEKS inputting all my information, only to have it all disappear with no trace. I am quite computer literate, and I scrounged the computer for a trace of my lost data, but it was nowhere to be found. Now, when I fill out a page in the planner, I hit SAVE immediately. But even then, when I switch to another page and go back to the page I already filled out, the data is gone. No customer support. Junk. Either don't use it, or print out each page as you fill it out.
This book covers a lot of material quite quickly. It does give a pretty nice overview of Federal Income Taxes and it does give a lot of information about handling your money. However, the scope of the book is large and so there is no particular focus on any one subject. It teaches a lot, but the information is too general to assist anyone in making a decision regarding their finances. But, having said that, the book does give excellent overviews and is a good resource for learning about the options available to anyone trying to live within their means.
This text was one of the best broad topic covering works I've seen in ages. As a college student you long for something that covers many horizons and yet does go into moderate depth. This work struck an excellent middle ground of "not too deep" and "not too few topics".
Tons of great information in one text that was even organized with rationality.
I am a busy mom, small biz owner and student! My life is hectic so I have very little time to do anything. I ordered this book without a problem. The quality of the book was exactly what was advertised and the book got to me WAY faster than I anticipated. AWESOME. Thanks!
The book is full of wonderful information if I could just ready any of it it would be great. Bought the book for $90, the more expensive one that I found and received it and it had highlighting all through it. Awful highlighting barely any of the book is not highlighted. Will never buy from this person again. They said the book was in excellenet condition, nothing about hightlighting. - Textbook - School Books'
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