Please Send Money. A Financial Survival Guide for Young Adults on Their Own.

by Dara Duguay

Consider these facts. The average college student graduates with $20,000 of debt. Nearly 10 percent of students owe creditors more than $7,000. The average credit card debt of teenagers rose 305 percent from 1990 to 2000. The financial world has become increasingly complex and dangerous over the last decade, and young adults are the most vulnerable targets. Learning to manage your money wisely is now more important than ever.

Please Send Money provides students and young people with the tools they need to navigate the tumultuous world of personal finance. This book is filled with dozens of real-life stories, chronicling eye-opening financial mistakes that are commonly made. Duguay offers advice on how to avoid these problems, covering such topics

--Easy credit and the proliferation of credit cards
--How to manage car payments
--The dangers of using student loans for personal needs and wants
--Dealing with bankruptcy
--Overcoming material temptations

Please Send Money also contains various financial tools, from a psychology-of-money test to worksheets for determining budget, net worth, cost of credit and safe debt levels. Please Send Money is a book that no young adult should be without.

Genres: Personal Finance, Nonfiction

256 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2001

Reviews

[Tani · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is exactly what it says: a guide for those of us who are going to be out on our own for the first time. For the most part, it's pretty basic and there's definitely a lot of repetition that makes it a little frustrating to read. Still, if you have no clue how to manage your personal finances, it has some nice tools for helping you to do things like figure out a budget, and it definitely tells you what not to do. At the very least, I feel a lot better about myself, having read the tales of financial stupidity that this book is packed with.

[Britney · Rating 3 out of 5]

A quick read, but it didn't contain much that I didn't already know: don't spend more money than you earn, and don't rely too heavily on credit.

[Giovanne · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book is fun.

[Denise · Rating 2 out of 5]

All the TERRIBLE WARNING stories got really annoying after a while.

[Christopher Brehm · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a helpful book when I was in college to help organize my finances.

[Mz. Fro]

I feel like I'm going to barf....this book is my life.

[Alexandra · Rating 2 out of 5]

I thought that it gave good advice; but after a while it just started to repeat the same message over and over.