Tamsen Butler - The Complete Guide to Personal Finance. For Teenagers and College Students

The Complete Guide to

Personal Finance

For Teenagers and College Students

By Tamsen Butler

With Foreword By Darlene Gudrie Butts, veteran financial adviser and author of Lessons from the Depression: Eliminating Debt the Old-Fashioned Way

The Complete Guide to Personal Finance: For Teenagers and College Students

Copyright 2010 Atlantic Publishing Group, Inc.

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No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without the prior written permission of the Publisher. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be sent to Atlantic Publishing Group, Inc., 1405 SW 6th Avenue, Ocala, Florida 34471.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Butler, Tamsen, 1974

The complete guide to personal finance : for teenagers and college students / by Tamsen Butler.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978-1-60138-207-8 (alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 1-60138-207-3 (alk. paper)

1. Teenagers--Finance, Personal. 2. College students--Finance, Personal. 3. Finance, Personal. I. Title.

HG179.B877 2010

332.02400835--dc22

2009048109

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A few years back we lost our beloved pet dog Bear, who was not only our best and dearest friend but also the Vice President of Sunshine here at Atlantic Publishing. He did not receive a salary but worked tirelessly 24 hours a day to please his parents.

Bear was a rescue dog who turned around and showered myself, my wife, Sherri, his grandparents Jean, Bob, and Nancy, and every person and animal he met (well, maybe not rabbits) with friendship and love. He made a lot of people smile every day.

We wanted you to know a portion of the profits of this book will be donated in Bears memory to local animal shelters, parks, conservation organizations, and other individuals and nonprofit organizations in need of assistance.

Douglas and Sherri Brown

PS: We have since adopted two more rescue dogs: first Scout, and the following year, Ginger. They were both mixed golden retrievers who needed a home.

Want to help animals and the world? Here are a dozen easy suggestions you and your family can implement today:

• Adopt and rescue a pet from a local shelter.
• Support local and no-kill animal shelters.
• Plant a tree to honor someone you love.
• Be a developer put up some birdhouses.
• Buy live, potted Christmas trees and replant them.
• Make sure you spend time with your animals each day.
• Save natural resources by recycling and buying recycled products.
• Drink tap water, or filter your own water at home.
• Whenever possible, limit your use of or do not use pesticides.
• If you eat seafood, make sustainable choices.
• Support your local farmers market.
• Get outside. Visit a park, volunteer, walk your dog, or ride your bike.

Five years ago, Atlantic Publishing signed the Green Press Initiative. These guidelines promote environmentally friendly practices, such as using recycled stock and vegetable-based inks, avoiding waste, choosing energy-efficient resources, and promoting a no-pulping policy. We now use 100-percent recycled stock on all our books. The results: in one year, switching to post-consumer recycled stock saved 24 mature trees, 5,000 gallons of water, the equivalent of the total energy used for one home in a year, and the equivalent of the greenhouse gases from one car driven for a year.

Dedication

For David and Cleo Aisenson: The best Nana and Papa and great examples of effectively managing personal finances while still having a lot of fun.

Foreword

T rying to figure out the money game can be challenging for anyone, let alone a teenager or young adult. There are so many concepts to learn, and most often, those concepts are interpreted by teens as boring or complicated. Many parents do not feel competent to teach personal finance, and it is not a subject taught in school. Couple that with the fact that 60 percent of bachelors degree recipients borrow to fund their education and 84 percent of undergraduate students have at least one credit card, and you have a disaster waiting to happen.

This book is trying to change that trend. Tamsen Butler, in The Complete Guide to Personal Finance: For Teenagers and College Students , seems to do the impossible. This book provides a proper education in personal finance in an entertaining and understandable manner.

The purpose of this book is not to tell the readers what to do, but to educate them on the various options and the possible results of ones choices. Even if all of the information is not relevant to your current situation, this book can be used as a reference for each financial stage of the early adult years. It is comprehensive and user-friendly, and it is sprinkled with real-life anecdotes that illustrate each financial concept. Anyone can benefit from this approach to teaching personal financial planning.

As a veteran financial adviser and author of Lessons from the Depression: Eliminating Debt the Old-Fashioned Way , I found the information in this book extremely helpful in conveying the concepts a teenager or college student needs for a financially successful life. For those students who are looking for information on their own, or parents who want to find a guide that will teach fundamental financial concepts, this book will teach you everything you need to know. Butler has done a great job of writing an easy-to-read and informative book on a subject that all can benefit from.