This review is embarrassingly long-overdue. I won a free (signed) copy of the paperback in a contest on jlcollinsnh.com . It was a simple raffle, with no strings attached, but it is customary in circumstances such as these to review the book. Which has taken me a very long time to do because I am chronically ill/disabled, and for a long time, my brain was not working well enough to be able to read anything more taxing than social media or article abstracts. However, this year I have regained a bit of cognitive function, and have been able to read a few books, for which I am incredibly grateful. So, without further ado, here is my very tardy book review:
For a very long time, most of the voices in the personal finance space were male and white and economically privileged. In the US, that started to change in the 80s and 90s, with books like Making the Most of Your Money, by Jane Bryant Quinn (1991); Your Money or Your Life (YMOYL), written by Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin (1992); and The Tightwad Gazette I, II, and III, written by Amy Dacyczyn (1992, 1995, 1996).
Personal Finance books started to reflect some societal changes, such as women in the workplace, with credit cards in their own names, money to invest, and the desire to plan for their financial security and their retirement. But the voices were still predominantly white and higher socioeconomic status (SES). Even the book The Millionaire Next Door (1996), which featured examples of men who had become wealthy in (mostly) blue-collar professions and who discussed their down-to-earth lifestyles (as contrasted to splashy millionaires on TV like those featured in Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, or fictionalized in the shows Dynasty and Dallas), mostly referred to their wives as stay-at-home coupon-clippers (in other words, they could afford to be single-income families, and the husband was the breadwinner).
As I began my adult life, I learned to get rid of debt and to begin to save. But once I reached that point, I was baffled about what to do next. No one *I* knew had investments or retirement accounts. The most financially-savvy people I knew had Christmas accounts, which saved an allocation from your paycheck each month so that you could withdraw your savings at the end of the year and be able to afford the extra expenses of the Christmas holidays. (That’s what they were called, and no one seemed to acknowledge that not all employees celebrated Christmas.)
In fact, to back my story up even further, I was a first-generation college student. And, boy, did I *not* know what I was doing when I went through middle school, high school, and college! The expectation that I would *go* to college was crystal clear and frequently reinforced, but how to get accepted to college, how to select an academic major, and how a college degree translated to getting a “good job” afterward were pretty mysterious to me. I pretty much flailed my way through all of it.
As I tried to learn about personal finance, I eventually turned to the personal finance section of my local public library and read nearly the entire section. Most of those books were helpful, but didn’t represent my circumstances. So imagine my delight, years later, to read a book written by someone who came from similar circumstances. In fact, in many ways, her childhood circumstances had been far worse than mine. While I grew up below the poverty level in America, Kristy Shen was born in abject poverty in Communist China.
In Quit Like a Millionaire, Kristy talks about things I never saw mentioned in other personal finance books, such as:
“When you’re poor, your choice isn’t between Barbie and My Little Pony. Your choice is between food, heat, and medicine, in that order.”
Kristy Shen and Bryce Leung, Quit Like a Millionaire, p.4
I remember My Boomer Parent begging the apartment manager for more time to come up with the rent payment. I remember the phone or the electricity being turned off because the bill hadn’t been paid. I remember having no medical insurance for most of my childhood, and therefore never seeing a doctor or a dentist. I remember finding ways to get to extracurricular activities (in order to have a college-worthy resume) because we couldn’t afford to own a car. But these are experiences I seldom saw represented in the personal finance/Financial Independence (PF/FIRE) communities.
Most people are talking about how to go from being well-off in affluent countries to being even better off, so that they can afford to stop working altogether and even travel the world. (Which is, in fact, what Kristy and Bryce have done – quit working and travel the world.) But Kristy is one of the only people talking about getting to that point after starting at a point so very, very far away from that – a point at which her family lived on forty-four cents a day.
While I enjoyed all of Kristy and Bryce’s book, the parts that resonated the most with me were the ones in which Kristy talks about education.
“Around the world, education often remains the only way out of poverty.” – Kristy Shen & Bryce Leung, Quit Like a Millionaire, p.24
Education was my pathway out of poverty, and it was Spousal Unit’s pathway out of poverty as well. And when I read chapter four, in which Kristy talks about how she selected both a college and a degree program based upon how much the associated career would pay after graduation in relation to how much the tuition was to attend said college and complete said degree, I suddenly flashed back to ninth grade.
Where I grew up, middle school/junior high consisted of grades 7, 8, and 9, and high school consisted of grades 10, 11, and 12. In the spring semester of ninth grade, guidance counselors came from the high school to the junior high school to help process our transition between schools in the fall. I distinctly remember the guidance counselor asking me what I wanted my academic major to be in high school. I was not prepared for this question. Not only did I not know I would be asked this question, I didn’t know what an academic major was, let alone which one I should select. The guidance counselor was very patient with me as I asked him numerous questions, but he refused to answer when I asked him which major was the “best” or which one I “should” major in. He insisted that I had to select for myself, and that he would not influence my decision.
I’ve thought about this moment a lot over the years, but it wasn’t until I read Quit Like a Millionaire that I finally fully understood this interplay. The guidance counselor might have had many reasons for not wanting to influence my decision. But he never understood my fundamental questions, which I didn’t myself know how to express: “Which academic major in high school is going to lead to the most career opportunities later in my life? Which academic major is going to lift me out of poverty? Which academic major will lead to financial security?” Eventually, I chose to major in math and science in high school, which led to a full-ride scholarship for college, a guaranteed job after college, and ultimately, financial security and financial independence.
But in ninth grade, what I was really asking the guidance counselor was, “How do I prepare in high school for a secure job in the future where I can make enough to pay my bills?” However, as well-meaning as my guidance counselor was, he couldn’t understand the questions I didn’t know how to word, because he didn’t have the same frame-of-reference I did: Poverty and determination to get out of poverty. Like Kristy, I wasn’t thinking about what classes I might enjoy in high school, or what my passions were. I was thinking about survival. The guidance counselor was asking me clarifying questions like “What do I enjoy?” and “What are my aptitudes?” None of that mattered to me then. From a survival mode, all I wanted to know is how to secure a J-O-B. “What would make me marketable?” Like Kristy and her dad, I wanted to know how to turn education into financial security.
Unlike me, Kristy found a way to express and quantify this idea, and her Pay-Over-Tuition (POT) calculation (pp. 27-28) has stayed with me ever since I read this book, and it’s a tool I highly recommend to others.
If you are financially comfortable, you might have the luxury to study whatever you desire. If you’re not, then Kristy’s calculations can help you decide where to go to college, how much to pay for college, and what academic major/future career to select, in such a way as to pursue the greatest potential rate-of-return.
Of course, as we’ve seen with the recent upheaval in the computer technology career space, there are no guarantees. Economies change. Politics change. The best you can do is make the best decision you can at the time with the information you’ve got. Quit Like a Millionaire helps you make those decisions.
Overall, I really enjoyed reading Quit Like a Millionaire and hearing voices and experiences represented with which I could identify. I hope we will continue to see more personal finance content that represents a broader range of the human experience and the financial experience. Everyone can benefit from access to financial information and financial conversations, and sometimes it helps to hear from a voice with which one can more closely identify.
NOTE: I was not compensated in any way for this review, other than having won a free copy of this book in a contest in exchange for my honest review.
