The Financial Diet is a financial blog oriented towards young women, which boasts not only a high reader count and rotating roster of writers on their own domain, but also a popular accompanying YouTube account, which creates videos on similar topics. Based around topics like money mistakes, career advice, and a budget-friendly lifestyle, the blog has been a favorite of mine for a while now.
I picked up Chelsea Fagan and Lauren Ver Hage's book with the expectation that it would be more of the same that I get from their website, and was happy to see that was true... most of the time.
The book is chock full of solid advice, explained in a way that is accessible and understandable for those just starting to pay attention to their finances, with an emphasis placed on learning the basics to build up to greater financial comprehension. Divided into neat sections like "Budget," "Food," "Home," and "Love," the book takes a multi-faceted approach to learning how your personal perspectives on money interact with the other parts of your life, and how to make sure you are living well without spending big. The segments that get a little more technical - like the chapter on how to "Invest" intelligently - spends a lot of time laying groundwork, and makes good use of the glossary of terms at the back of the book.
The topics are diverse, the writing is straightforward and focused on creating understanding, and the diction is deliberately conversational. The only thing that leaves something to be desired, is the style.
The Financial Diet, like I said, has a fan base that is primarily built up of young women, which has been achieved not just due to their various authorial perspectives, and light-hearted writing, but due to the Millenial-friendly aesthetic their blog has used as a part of its design and layout. They tried to carry this over to their book, and unfortunately, the results are a little jarring.
Of course, the content is all still there, but instead of using real photographs of people, places, etc, they employ the use of cutesy illustrations. The information is wrapped up in a cohesive series of color palettes you could probably recognize from the blog, but utilize multiple different fonts throughout the construction of the book, and you could see where the editor or graphic designer mixed a few up on the page. While the actual writing of the book was great, it was the way it was packaged that was a little grating to me.
However, one place where the graphic styling was an enormous bonus to the book, was in the inclusion of mini-interviews and queries to notable industry names, in order to gain more understanding of finance than just the authors'. In each chapter, a breakout section cataloged perspectives of people like Ashley Ford, Hank Green, and even the author's own mother, in order to present alternative ways of thinking, complete with such portrait illustrations. These sections were interesting, informative, and created division points in the chapters that made reading through each feel like a breeze.
Final verdict: all in all, the book is relatively short, able to process through quickly, and laid out in a way that makes it very appealing to their core demographic. I enjoyed it, and I'm sure the several people who already have holds on the library listing are going to enjoy it, as well!
Are you trying to get a handle on your finances this year? What were some of your resolutions? Let me know, in the comments below!
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