Control Your Cash Book review

About the book

Control Your Cash is a great personal finance book written by Yakezie Member Greg McFarlane and Betty Kincaid. The book covers a range of personal finance topics – bank accounts, credit cards, credit score, investing, securities, buying a car, buying a home, budgeting, taxes and entrepreneurship.

What I liked about it

Almost everything. These are some of the points that stand out.

  1. The authors say this in the preface – “This book simply teaches- and teaches simply- the fundamentals of finance.” And they have accomplished that. It covers everything you need to know about the basics of personal finance. It talks about every important concept in a clear, concise way, in layman terms. The book is full of no-nonsense, solid information.
  2. Explains every single term. I can see me using this as a reference book that I will refer to again and again.
  3. Important terms are emphasized and numbers/calculations are clearly explained. Nothing is left out for the reader to guess or assume.
  4. Every chapter is great by itself. So even if you are a person who is good in most of the personal finance arena, but could use some help in one or two specific areas, you can get that from this book. I especially liked the chapters on buying a home and entrepreneurship. If you are new to any particular topic you can go to that chapter and it will be a great primer. You don’t need to know any jargon. This book will tell you everything you need to start. All you need is a willingness to learn.

What I didn’t like about it?

Actually I liked almost all of it, if I really have to pick something it will be these two issues –

  1. To go with my #2 in what I liked about it, it could be a perfect reference book, but an index is missing (at least in the print version). I would have loved an index as an easy way to look up a specific term instead of browsing through the relevant chapter. This is my only real complaint.
  2. Credit card chapter, the Discover card and American express cards were recommended as the best cards over Visa & Master Card. I didn’t get that part. I also felt the other benefits of credit cards could have been highlighted as well (like rental car insurance).

Summary

This book is not a get rich quickly book, the book sets out to provide one thing – personal finance education in a clear, concise way. And it accomplishes that. A perfect personal finance manual.

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