Finance Life Cycle

For most people, budgeting conjures up the same feelings as, say, prison and dieting. But your initial instinct couldn't be further from the truth. You just haven't budgeted the right way. You Need a Budget will teach you four simple rules to completely revolutionize the way you think about managing your money. With a budget, you'll break the paycheck-to-paycheck cycle, get out of debt, and save more money. A liberating, enabling, empowering budget will actually make you feel more free, not more restricted.

Think of this as your personal investment toolkit--packed with step-by-step instructions and sure-fire secrets to making money. You'll learn the fastest ways to supercharge your portfolio and make the most of whatever assets you have. You'll discover how to build cash in your own Wealth Account, scout out new opportunities, and invest in a wide range of asset classes through direct asset allocation. With financial expert Loral Langemeier as your guide, you can take control of your assets--and generate new income.

In finance, as in life, there's no such thing as a free lunch - unless you're well diversified. The push toward diversification inspires many investors to buy index funds, which is a smart move. But most people have missed the chance to diversify over their investing lifecycle.

In Solving Your Money Problems, Pastor David Crank simplifies the scary and unleashes the new of way of thinking about money. Teaching the nuts and bolts of finances, he outlines easy and accessible ways to budget, eliminate debt, increase savings, and give generously.

Just as grownups do not believe in the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, or Santa Claus, "Investing adults" know that there is no such creature as the Stock-picking Fairy or the Market-timing Fairy. Further, there is no Risk Fairy who will write you cheap options that will protect your stock holdings against loss. Investing adults are familiar with Gene Fama, Zvi Bodie, Jack Bogle, and Burton Malkiel, and understand that a mean variance optimizer does not blend vegetables. In other words, this series is not for beginners.

Popular economics and human events blogger George Ure ("Dimensions Next Door", "Packing to Die" and "Psychocartography") is back with another refreshing perspective on the human condition. Sure, there are too many people in the world. Tough on the planet and all. But Ure unleashes in his quirky thinking style and concludes population is only part of our curse. The balance of issues may be laid at the feet of slipshod goods from a manufacturing sector designed to make money at the expense of long-lived, smart humans. As the book unfolds, you'll be schooled in how modern industry forces ...

We may not often think of our clothes as having a function beyond covering our naked bodies and keeping us a little safer from the elements. But to discount the enormous influence of clothing on anything from economic cycles to the future of water scarcity is to ignore the greater meaning of the garments we put on our backs. Disrobed vividly considers the role that clothing plays in everything from natural disasters to climate change to terrorism to geopolitics to agribusiness.