Book Review: The Courage to be Rich by Suze Orman

in #books2 years ago

Suze Orman is an American financial writer whose speciality is in exploring and understanding the way people's emotions and social situations affect how they handle their money.

Her book, The Courage to be Rich, starts off with a series of exercises designed to uncover how people feel about money, what they learnt about it in childhood, and how these emotions affect how they handle money now. The book is rich in anecdotes illustrating her points: eg the story of Mark, who feels he has to prove he is not poor by buying leaving big tips and buying more rounds in the pub than anyone else.

She then goes on to talk about how to resolve these issues. She talks about how getting rid of clutter in your house. I was sceptical on this point till someone close to me starting sorting out their old files and found a load of dividend cheques they had simply put away, intending to deal with them later, and then forgotten about them. In this sense she's right - clutter means that we lose track of how much we are buying and lose control of the minor things we need to do to keep our finances running smoothly.

The next exercise involves looking at spending patterns and how we are seduced into buying premium this and that. She also deals with the issue of instant gratification, and how we find it hard to wait for things.

The chapters on Love and Money mark this book out as different to the other financial books on the market. She believes that incompatibility on how to handle money, and arguments over money are what breaks couples up (they usually don't check that they match in this area when they get together). She goes into quite a bit of detail on divorce, and what people's rights are and how they should cope with it financially.

I would recommend this book to people who've read loads of financial books and still haven't got on top of their money. The psychological insights might just help them. I would also recommend this book to people who are going through a divorce, as I think this is the only financial book on the market dealing with these issues.

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Suze Orman is a bit of a legend in the personal finance world.