Start Here: Getting Your Financial Life on Track

Whether you are just getting started or starting late, developing a life strategy is an essential tool for people of any age. It s about setting and reaching personal goals. However, listing specific objectives (owning a house, retiring young, putting children through college) is only a first step.

How will you go about accomplishing these goals? Do they take into account mounting bills and the problems encountered trying to pay them on time? What will happen if your credit score dips and the availability of loans quickly shrinks? Start Here: Getting Your Financial Life on Track is the guide to fulfilling your dreams. It s a study of tactics: concrete plans and procedures for getting what you want, specifically in the realm of money. To simplify what can quickly become an unwieldy and complicated subject, the book is organized around 10 tough money tasks. Some of the topics include:

How to Pay Your Bills on Time

Your Credit Score And What to Do about It

Couples and Money: Outsmarting Conflict

Is It Time to Buy a House?

The book delivers the detail that you need to make the right decisions. Paying your bills on time is not just about allocating your income. More basically it s about knowing when bills are due. The trick is to organize bills and payments in a way that works. Then the benefits will follow: control, comfort, and a good credit rating.

Start Here guides you through many different stages of your financial life. The information is clear and concise, never too complex and never too simple. For example, when you decide to move in with your significant other, Start Here has many useful guidelines to protect the financial interests of you and your loved one. This practical advice covers everything from pre-nuptial agreements (both formal and informal) to creating and financing a house account.

Unlike other similarly focused titles, Start Here is produced by an organization that has no agenda to push, no outside products to advertise, and no commercial services to highlight. This book is written by R.D. Norton, a former professor of economics at University of Texas at Dallas, Mount Holyoke College, and Bryant College. Dr. Norton is keenly aware of the challenges facing those starting their financial lives and provides readers with the tools they need to reach their life goals.

Dr. R.D. Norton is a Senior Fellow and Research Adviser at the American Institute for Economic Researcher. He is the author or editor of a dozen books on economics and finance and holds a Ph.D. from Princeton University. He was formerly Executive Director of the Eastern Economic Association and an economics professor at the University of Texas at Dallas, Mount Holyoke College, and Bryant University, where he had an endowed chair in business economics.