The New Century Family Money Book : Your Comprehensive Guide to a Lifetime of Financial Security

A family money guide for the 1990s--filled with worksheets and quizzes--outlines simple strategies for achieving financial security, cutting health-care costs, minimizing taxes, living beneath one's means, and finding affordable insurance. 50,000 first printing. $50,000 ad/promo.

Head of a Boston-area financial planning service, Pond ( 1001 Ways to Cut Your Expenses ), who appears weekly on the Today show, here offers an uncommonly far-reaching and clearly organized money manual. He presses for budget programming (" . . . live beneath your means"), regular cash-flow evaluation and prudent, habitual investment. Chapters cover future planning, home and auto ownership, college and health-care costs, insurance and taxes. Pond also offers sage advice on the range of domestic and foreign investment possibilities: banking, borrowing, brokerage accounts, mutual funds, stocks and bonds, Social Security, company pension plans, personal IRAs and annuities.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Pond, a financial planner who appears weekly on the Today show, writes with clarity and good cheer, an appropriate approach when contemplating death and taxes. His book will be of interest to the unsophisticated household financial manager. The coverage takes us from birth ("the arrival of children") through marriage to death and broadly embraces "getting started" through the labyrinth of insurance, investing, and taxes to the finalities of retirement and estate planning. The book is timely, addressing such money matters as cohabitation and "surviving a divorce." This starter book is action oriented: throughout, we are bombarded with pithy "smart money move" suggestions. The disappointing concluding chapter, "It's Up to You," takes the author off the hook. Some chapters do provide suggestions for finding more information, but further guidance is generally lacking. All things considered, and recognizing the audience for which the book is intended, this is a useful compendium.
- Peggy Smith, Pennsylvania State Univ., University Park
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.