Simple....Not Easy: A Practical Guide to Financial Health and Prosperity

Table of Contents

Introduction

About the Author

Ch 1.  What’s the Point?

Ch 2.  Start with Goal Setting

Ch 3.  A Primer on Debt

Ch 4.  Your Income

Ch 5.  Budgeting to Reach Your Goals

Ch 6.  Saving & Investing

Ch 7.  Insurance

Ch 8.  Estate Planning

Ch 9. Taxes

Ch 10. Financial Health and You

Ch 11. In Real Life

Concluding Thoughts

Appendix A: 10 Indicators of Financial Health

Resources

Introduction

There are no shortcuts to any place worth going. Beverly Sills

For many years I have thought something needed doing about the lack of education people get during their formative years regarding the financial issues of life.  Whether at home or in school, people don’t come out of high school or college with the skills necessary to completely understand their finances.  It is not until their financial mistakes add up, that they begin learning how to manage their finances well.  My goal in writing this book is to help you live a financial life that is intentional.  One that enables you to create the life you want, by setting goals, following a plan that brings those goals to reality, and sharing with you the habits that will make it all possible.  Without a guide to help us, we humans tend to go with the flow; but with a plan, we can make active decisions that are intentional and put us one step closer to accomplishing what we set out to do.

We grow up, we graduate from high school, we might go to college or we go to work full time.  Many of us will marry, have kids, and at some point, we’ll have ten plates spinning at the same time.  We have to figure out how to pay our student loan, pay for the kid's braces, pay the rent or mortgage, pay for school pictures, or cover the ordinary and necessary expenses we have in life and put a little in savings. Oh! and save for the kids’ college fund and put away something for our retirement, all while dealing with financial throat punches along the way.  I define financial throat punches as unforeseen financial emergencies like a huge vet bill or car repair.  All these things happening at the same time.  With intention and planning, these financial issues are nothing more than a fly in your soup.  None of it will happen by accident.  Without a plan, you might accidentally spend too much on your vacation and charge more than you thought on your credit card.  On a whim, you might buy a timeshare that will haunt you for the rest of your life.  Knowing and understanding the types of financial decisions you will have to make and how to deal with them is the key to personal financial success.

This is a book about building wise financial habits when you are young and building upon them year in and year out while making minor tweaks when necessary.  What I want to do is provide you a roadmap that gives you the skills to achieve the personal and family financial goals you want to, no matter your timeline.  As such, its topics include strategies to help you with goal setting to reach your financial goals, household budgeting, debt management, savings, and investing.  It is about the planning and execution of smart financial decisions all adults need to make at some point in their life.  They don’t teach this stuff in school when we’re growing up, and even if they did, the research shows it wouldn’t stick anyway.  Do you remember the formula for finding the area of a trapezoid or how to graph a quadratic equation?  Most things we learn, if we don’t use them have a shelf life in our brains. 

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, there are two forms of literacy the skills-based (operational) form of literacy which involves the use of printed materials such as reading, writing, and arithmetic.  Then there is the task-based (conceptual) side of it.  This form of literacy takes the first level and utilizes it in daily life.  In other words, taking what you learn and using it to achieve your goals, and to develop your potential.  Literacy involves more than just learning the general concepts but it’s using them in your life for your benefit or the community in which you live.

MY GOAL IS TO TEACH you more than just at the knowledge level of understanding but to take it a step further and get you to the point where you are applying the knowledge in your daily life to accomplish your personal financial goals.  Ultimately, we all are given the same 24 hours each day.  We don’t know what tomorrow brings, but we do owe it to ourselves to be smart along the way, don’t we?  Who knows, you could get hit by a random tire flying through the window into the diner you like to eat at tomorrow morning, or you could just as easily be that person that lives to be 102 years old.  Having a plan for both of these situations is part of this book, so I hope you enjoy it.  I intend it to be informative as well as entertaining so there’ll be some satire sprinkled in along the way.  Dad jokes only of course.

About The Author

If there is one thing I know, it’s my fantastic is talk Andy Dwyer

My name is Jim, I grew up in a suburb of Dayton, Ohio in a town called West Carrollton.  I didn’t come from a wealthy family or one of status, but just a regular Midwestern home.  We played outside as kids, played euchre at the dinner table, we went to the pool during the summer, had snowball fights in the winter, and, man, do we love our Marion’s Pizza and Skyline Chili!  I went to public school midway through the sixth grade until my parents saw the direction I was headed as an angry and temperamental kid from a broken home.  They decided to send me to a Christian school, so midway through sixth grade, I went to Dayton Christian and that is where I graduated with a less than stellar GPA.  I never intended on going to college when I graduated, but my parents were adamant about it, so I went to the local community college for a short stint to take auto mechanics classes.

I got my first job at 15-years-old, a paper route in the neighborhood.  I wanted to start working earlier than that, but the lady that was in charge of the paperboys in the neighborhood said 15 was the earliest you could get a route.  So, the day I turned 15, I got a paper route.  Throughout my teenage years, I kept the paper route and mowed lawns with a high school friend of mine, and I always had money.  Pretty soon I was working at the mall just to be near where the girls were hanging out.  I always liked working for myself, which is odd because in 1995 I joined the Air Force.  In the Air Force, you do what you are told, you follow orders, and you don’t question authority.  I spent 20 years in the Air Force and retired while stationed in South Dakota.  I moved back home, got married, and got back into living in Ohio again.

One of the benefits of being in the Air Force was the time and money to go to school.  I began taking college classes on base during lunch and in the evenings, and I eventually got my first Associate’s Degree.  During my 20 years in the Air Force, I amassed 230 semester hours of school and had no college debt.  Finally, after three associate degrees, I decided on a major for my bachelor’s degree: Personal Financial Planning. 

When I retired from the Air Force in 2014, I began