Introduction
W
elcome to Managing Your Money All-in-One For Dummies, a big one-
stop shop designed to help you get control over your financial life!
This book tackles a lot of big topics, but we've tried to keep things simple,
clear, and to-the-point. We've culled the best, juiciest information from a
good sampling of For Dummies books on personal finance and compiled them
into one fat volume. It's absolutely packed with easy-to-grasp advice on all
things having to do with managing your money. Whether you're a home-
maker, truck driver, burger flipper, or CEO -- whether you're interviewing for
your first job or you retired ten years ago -- we bet you'll find scads of great
tips and sound advice in these pages that will help you get a handle on every-
thing from your credit cards to your health insurance, from your groceries to
your taxes to your will.
If it has something to do with your personal relationship to your own money,
it's a good bet we talk about it in this book. Managing Your Money All-in-
One For Dummies offers money-management and personal-finance tips to
help assess your true financial situation and take charge of your economic
life. You'll find information on getting the best mortgage, saving for the
future (whether for college or retirement), paying off debt, scaling back on
expenses, managing home and personal budgets, repairing and improving
your credit rating, planning an estate, banking online, saving and investing,
and protecting your money and other assets.
The facts on the ground aren't pretty at the moment. Real wages have been
stagnant or declining for nearly 40 years in America. And in the current cli-
mate of economic uncertainty, skyrocketing home foreclosures, job cuts,
bank failures, and unaffordable health insurance, many people feel more pow-
erless than ever against mighty and faceless institutions that seem designed
for nothing but to confuse and rip off. We're here to tell you: It doesn't have to
be that way. By doing a little homework and taking a renewed interest in your
own situation, you can reclaim many rights and advantages you probably
didn't know you had.
If information is power, then this book is like a gigantic supervitamin.
