Generation Earn | Book Review

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The following book review was written by Christine Veloria.

I read Generation Earn: The Young Professional’s Guide to Spending, Investing, and Giving Back by Kimberly Palmer. This book is geared toward the forty year old and younger professional person that is a college graduate. The book is full of stories from professionals that explain their financial situations and what they did to solve their financial dilemmas. There are a wide range of topics that the author: debt, purchasing houses, starting a business, life changes such as having a child and investing. All these are written in a way that highlights what is concerning some of the young professionals these days; many are concerned with being green and are socially aware of the problems facing our communities.

The book is divided into three sections:

1. Building your life
2. Creating a home
3. Changing the World.

The whole book uses stories to explain the different financial situations that people are in today. “Building your life” focuses on stories about people and their jobs, spending habits, investments, retirement accounts and debt. Since the book is geared toward professionals the chances of them having debt is high because of how much college costs and the student loans they accumulate. But is that debt really good debt?

Part two, “Creating a Home” are stories about marriage, living arrangements, mortgages, children and bank accounts. Is it better to have separate accounts or joint accounts for couples? The last section is about “Changing the World.” Do you want what you invest in to help change the world that you live in? There are stories about creating a non for profit organization and should you invest in companies that have your same values.

Did I like this book?

This book was easy to read because it was stories from people; it was like listening to friend telling you what they had experienced and what they did to solve it. It didn’t leave you feeling bored because the subjects changed as did the characters. One of the things that I did find to be distracting were the Quick Tips the are situated sometimes right in the middle of a story and sometimes they didn’t pertain to what was in the stories. While the stories could be interesting, I found it to lack what I needed in terms of depth, it seems to skim over the topics but it could give someone enough to get them interested in an idea. It did give me a few ideas that I could use for myself. For me I also didn’t connect on a few levels because I am not a professional, have yet to graduate from college and my values differed on some of the topics but not all. I tend to lean more towards the Dave Ramsey’s side of some topics.

Have you read Generation Earn? What did you think?