Erica Alini - Money Like You Mean It: Personal Finance Tactics for the Real World

Money
LIKE YOU
Mean It

Money
LIKE YOU
Mean It

PERSONAL FINANCE TACTICS FOR THE REAL WORLD

ERICA ALINI

Copyright Erica Alini, 2022

All rights reserved. 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, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purpose of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from Access Copyright.

This book is meant for informational purposes only. The views expressed are the authors only and should not be used or relied upon as financial, legal, tax, or other professional advice. As well, the contents of this book are not intended to serve as recommendations regarding the suitability, profitability, or potential value of any particular investment, product, service, or course of action.

Publisher: Scott Fraser | Acquiring editor: Kathryn Lane | Editor: Susan Fitzgerald

Cover image: istock.com/sorbetto

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: Money like you mean it : personal finance tactics for the real world / Erica Alini.

Names: Alini, Erica, author.

Description: Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20210312807 | Canadiana (ebook) 20210312866 | ISBN 9781459748675 (softcover) | ISBN 9781459748682 (PDF) | ISBN 9781459748699 (EPUB)

Subjects: LCSH: Finance, Personal.

Classification: LCC HG179 .A4456 2022 | DDC 332.024dc23

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Ontario, through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit and Ontario Creates, and the Government of Canada.

Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book. The author and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credits in subsequent editions.

The publisher is not responsible for websites or their content unless they are owned by the publisher.

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To Chris, who makes everything possible, including writing a book
during a pandemic. To my parents. And to my patato Luca.

PERHAPS YOU KNOW this scenario. You and your partner have good jobs and promising careers. Youre so-called DINKs dual income, no kids. You treat yourself to craft beer and dare I say it avocado toast, perhaps? But youve been diligently squirrelling away a hefty chunk of your paycheques for years, and now you have what feels like a significant pile of money. Youre ready to buy a house but you just cant.

Or maybe you did buy a house, but only because your parents swooped in with a generous contribution to your down payment. Grateful as you are for the help, youre also ashamed of needing it.

If you have kids at this stage in your life, youre probably juggling rent or a mortgage, stratospheric child-care fees that amount to a whole other rent or mortgage, and the after-effects of seeing your income drop to half or less for a year or more during parental leave. And you may also still be paying off your student loans.

Or perhaps youre hopping from shift to shift or from freelance contract to freelance contract. Youre working evenings, weekends, and holidays. And yet youre barely stitching together a living.

We are millennials and the older Gen Zers. We work hard. Were doing all the right things (or at least some of them, anyway). And yet we do not have our financial ducks in a row. Purchasing a home with our own money, raising kids while also being able to pay for the occasional vacation, building up a retirement nest egg these are mundane middle-class financial goals. But many of us are struggling mightily to reach them.

This book is about understanding why youre struggling and about getting the financial know-how you need to fight back.

Even if you make a good living and are happy with your housing situation, managing your money can feel like wading through a daunting, overgrown jungle. Its easier than ever to wander in the wrong direction, end up with far more debt than you can afford, or unwittingly put your money in the wrong investments. Because sure, you can download an app that will let you buy a stock with a few thumb strikes. But did anyone ever teach you the first thing about investing? And do you have an employer pension that will actually pay for your life when youre too old to work? Unlikely.

Get a job, work hard, spend less than you make, and retire at 65. Thats advice for a world that has largely disappeared. To make it in todays economy, you need a whole new financial tool kit. And you need to know what youre up against. In this book, I draw on a decade of reporting on personal finance and economics to give you both the hands-on money basics you need to navigate day-to-day life and an understanding of the big forces that are shaping your financial reality.

Im the personal finance reporter at Global News, and Im an older millennial. This is the personal finance guide I wish Id had when I ventured out into the world of financial grown-upedness as a wide-eyed Bambi, right into the financial crisis of 20072008.

Back then I was living and working in the United States, the epicentre of the quake that threatened to bring down the global financial system. I had a front-row seat to the devastation of the Great Recession and the economic dark age that followed the financial crisis and dragged on for years. In New York, coffee shops and libraries were packed with recent graduates spending all day day after day applying for jobs. Positions they qualified for, jobs they didnt qualify for, gigs for which they were way overqualified. Answering calls, waiting tables, moving furniture. Anything would do. Anything. But there were so very few jobs to be had.

Even in Canada, where the recession and its fallout were less intense, things felt quite bleak if you were just starting out. And yet the world did not cut millennials back then more commonly called Gen Y much slack. We couldnt find jobs because we were lazy, spoiled, or clueless. Or all of the above. Those of us who went back to living with our parents for a while were dubbed the boomerang generation, a spineless breed that just wanted to live rent-free and play video games in the basement. I even found myself writing one of the articles decrying the supposed spendthrift ways of my own kind. (The telltale headline was Generation Spend. All I can say is I did not pitch the story.)