So if you have experienced life as a poor person in a rich country, you have undoubtedly been inundated with "advice" from middle class or rich people who just can't seem to fathom that the problem is that you don't have enough money; surely, it's that you don't know how to budget and save money and must be a spendthrift ...because that's the only reason THEY would ever be struggling to pay bills.
Let me tell you, if you're genuinely poor, you are the MASTER of budgeting and saving money. When you are counting pennies just to buy groceries, you KNOW how to budget and coupon and cook with cheap ingredients. You know it better than anyone.
What you generally actually might need help with, is what to do if you ever get out of poverty and succeed in reaching at least a level of wealth where you can do things like buy a house, or start a retirement account, because nobody teaches you that in school and it's unlikely your parents did, either.
This is the book, y'all. Now, most Suze Orman books (I've read several) are more like, empowerment around money, and not actually practical how-to, but this one is the down-and-dirty, this-is-how-shit-works book. It's so good I own it both in print and in audio (CDs pictured, lol).
She teaches you how mortgages, escrow, downpayments and all of that around buying a house works. How a 401(k), regular IRA, and Roth IRA work and what the difference is between them. All the things that really should be a mandatory high school economics class, is in this book. I highly recommend it, because I really learned a lot from it.
Years ago I had a job where I actually started to save for a retirement account (and then I lost that job and lived off of that savings for a long time... ). When I was signing up, you had to sit down with a financial planner to pick what you wanted. I went in with my notebook of notes and was like, "Well Suze Orman says... " and the dude was like "OH you're a Suze person? You know what you want!" and just let me do it. I barely had any questions.
What's the best financial advice (either a book or a class or just something that someone imparted to you that really helped you) that you've ever gotten? Let me know in the comments!
