Buy the Purse AND Fill the Piggy Bank: A Girl’s Handbook to Smart Money Moves

Money is part of our lives and regardless of whether someone has enough of it the challenge is to manage it rather than it manage you!

• The book contains content designed to provide basic financial knowledge and develop fundamental planning skills.
• The objective is to learn healthy financial habits goalsso you grow your financial power and can plan your financial future.
• Learn to evaluate our options, make intelligent choices and develop plans to achieve your personal financial goals.
• Each chapter presents concepts and address common issues in addition to orienting you within your personal situation
• Define your success, set your goals and design a focused and achievable action plan to support an individualized strategy.
• Simple tools and tips will increase the likelihood of achieving success as you define it.
• Turn your intention to action!

Look thru a window into other people’s bank accounts! Follow the characters along their financial path and learn from their experiences. A comfortable way to address this taboo and challenging topic.

Many consumers struggle with finances and make poor choices with their money – the consequences can be long lasting and can add extreme worry to daily life. It is extremely simple to obtain credit in our society and many find themselves in financial difficulty after purchasing things they cannot afford. In addition, savings are limited and a small hiccup such as illness, relocation or job change can have a disastrous effect on household finances. Take small steps to make big progress in your financial health. Whether financial success means a great car, a large home, annual vacations or meeting the needs and wants of daily life you can attain it. You need a plan!

Learn to make informed financial choices around topics such as debt, retirement and buying a home. Take the initiative and set a plan to achieve your personal financial goals.

Annotated Table of Contents

Section 1: Introduction and Road Map

A quick overview of the format of the book describing what information each section holds. This section includes a brief introduction to the Wise Piggy and the characters profiled throughout the book. A pullout reference section will be available in Section 1.

Section 2: The Short Cut to Sorting Your Finances

For those who want to skip directly to design a financial plan, Section 2 provides a short cut process to getting a financial plan completed and implementing some basics. If you know which areas of your money management needs work, you can target the area directly. The most common areas of personal finance that require attention are budgets, debt recovery, saving for big purchases, retirement and building wealth. The focus is on setting up a low maintenance plan and periodically monitoring progress in order to make any changes required.

Section 3: Design a Complete Financial Plan for Yourself

This section covers basic personal finance highlighting the need to identify reasonable goals and to build a plan with specific actions to achieve the vision. You are called upon to address your current financial situation, accept ownership for it and deal with it.

A focus on getting organized and understanding what components of everyday financial documentation are relevant to the process. It begins with the basics including income, expenses, assets and liabilities.

Learning to make choices, building a budget and what a bank account can do for you are some of the elements of this section. A great focus is on credit, use of credit and misuse of credit. How will you deal with the debt you’ve accumulated? Learn to solve the problem.

Following chapters include contingency planning, debt recovery (pitfalls, change lifestyle, tough choices), investment basics (types and concepts such as diversification) and retirement (calculations, resources, registered investments, making a plan, RSP loans, withdrawals, spousal RSP's). The final piece of this section encourages you to complete your plan or at least get started. Small and manageable steps!

Section 4: More Interesting & Important Stuff

This section is comprised of various topics including the financial considerations of getting married, having children, purchasing a first home, saving for a big purchase, insurance, benefits, losing a job, divorce and travel.

Section 5: Resources

Worksheets, reference material and a glossary are tucked at the end for easy reference.