52 Weeks to Financial Fitness: The Week-by-Week Plan for Making Your Money Grow

Introduction Look at this book as your personal trainer -- your friendly, expert, immediately useful, personal trainer. You know that the time has come to get into better shape, financially. For most people, just getting started is the hard part. But once you're on your way, you'll wonder how you ever performed at your peak without your personal trainer. No matter what kind of condition you're in now, your trainer will -- week by week -- carefully bring you to the next level. In sum, your trainer -- this book -- will show you, step by step, how you can become financially fit. Every week, you will have a measurable and reasonable task that you can accomplish -- or at least get a good start on. The first week out, we'll get you to perform a little work on the treadmill. We'll do simple things like making sure that you are collecting the highest interest available on your savings and checking accounts. Then, a short time later, we'll go into a bit of weight training by having you learn to use some personal finance software. Soon after that, we'll make sure you are putting your money into the right IRA for your circumstances. Next, we'll do some heavier lifting by pursuing some profitable strategies for buying stocks and reinvesting dividends. There's nothing extreme here -- no Triathlon spurts of futures or options. You don't have to take those kinds of risks. Getting your personal finances into good long-term shape is a demanding and often daunting job. But the work needed is much easier -- and you are more likely to succeed -- if you do one task at a time. We have divided your job of effecting a financial plan into 52 pieces, one week each. We do not expect you to complete everything involved with each task in just one week. We do expect that you will get a strong start on it, while recognizing that you will have to continue pursuing each specific goal for a long while to come. As you follow the practical suggestions in this book, you will feel better with every passing day. At the end of 52 weeks, you should have considerably greater control of your finances. And you can build from there. Staying fit will be something that you work at every day -- profitably -- for the rest of your life.Loeb, Marshall is the author of '52 Weeks to Financial Fitness: The Week-by-Week Plan for Making Your Money Grow' with ISBN 9780812933376 and ISBN 0812933370.