★ I Will Teach You To Be Rich

Allow me to clar­ify. I will not teach you to be rich, but Ramit Sethi might. I Will Teach You To Be Rich is the title of his newly released book which bor­rows the title from his web site. I’ve been fol­low­ing Ramit for a cou­ple of years now, and I will admit to ignor­ing his solid finan­cial ideas quite often.
He recently released his book, and I was not plan­ning on pur­chas­ing it, until he sweet­ened the deal with a con­test. Yes, I know. For shame. If I really liked Ramit’s writ­ing and infor­ma­tion, I would have pur­chased the book sight unseen and with­out any need for extra com­pen­sa­tion. But! I was attempt­ing to save money since I’m a help­less bib­lio­phile.

I didn’t win any­thing in the con­test, but I did receive Ramit’s book two days after order­ing it (I love Amazon Prime).  With a huge project loom­ing and some travel in the near future, I had to set the book aside for a few days. This past week­end, I took the oppor­tu­nity to finally crack it open and read it in sev­eral sit­tings before going to bed at night.

Ramit’s book is worth the mea­ger price being charged. Mind you, there may not be any­thing rev­o­lu­tion­ary in here, but the pre­sen­ta­tion is a wake-up call that I know I need every now and again. By point­ing out how costly sub­scrip­tions can be, Ramit reminded me to take a look at all of my cur­rent sub­scrip­tions.

I have a ten­dency to let lit­tle sub­scrip­tions creep and accrue over time. It turns out, I had almost $100 each month wrapped up in sub­scrip­tions, most of which I no longer used or used rarely. After about 20 min­utes of work, all of the unused sub­scrip­tions were can­celed, and I had saved more than $50 per month. There is one more sub­scrip­tion that I am on the fence about, and if I can­cel it, I will save an addi­tional $20 per month.

I would say that the book is paid for — and then some. Regardless of my per­sonal expe­ri­ences with it, I highly rec­om­mend it as there is plenty of advice on sav­ing money, prac­tic­ing fru­gal­ity,  automat­ing your finances, invest­ing intel­li­gently, and gen­er­ally mak­ing the act of money man­age­ment a lot more tol­er­a­ble. Ramit’s tar­get audi­ence is peo­ple in their 20s and 30s, but there is plenty to take away if you are in your 40s or 50s, too.

Weighing in at a lit­tle over 250 pages, it is a quick, witty — I laughed aloud sev­eral times while read­ing — book full of solid ideas and advice. If books aren’t your style, then at least take a moment to visit Ramit’s site, I Will Teach You To Be Rich. He writes excel­lent arti­cles, and the com­mu­nity that fre­quents the site shares many good tips and tricks as well.