2010 Consumer Action Handbook and Unautomate Your Finances
Published on - March 9th, 2010 (by J.D. Roth) Last autumn, I shared a list of essential personal-finance e-books. These books covered a variety of topics, and many of them were free. Today I want to draw your attention to two new e-books that you may want to consider.
Consumer Action Handbook
First up is the 2010 edition of the Consumer Action Handbook. I’ve mentioned this book before, and I’ll mention it in the future. This book is from the Federal Citizen Information Center, that small department of the U.S. government in Pueblo, Colorado, which distributes free and low-cost consumer publications.
The 2010 Consumer Action Handbook is a 172-page guide to becoming a savvy consumer, and includes information on buying a car, purchasing a home, preventing identity theft, shopping from home, creating a will, and handling unsatisfactory transactions. And much, much more.
This book would be a good buy at $10 or $15, but it’s freely available from the U.S. government. (Technically you’ve already paid for it with your tax dollars, of course.)
- You can order your copy here.
- A Spanish-language version is also available.
- You can also view the handbook in PDF format. You can view the entire handbook at once [11.9mb], or simply browse individual sections.
- Nearly all of the book’s content is available via the Consumer Action web site.
This book is a great resource, and I encourage you to order a copy, download the PDF, or bookmark the web site. Though the 2010 Consumer Action Handbook doesn’t go into great depth on any subject, it provides excellent informative overviews, and it usually points to further resources. It’s perfectly at home on the shelf with all of my other personal finance books. (And was, in fact, an excellent source while writing Your Money: The Missing Manual.)
Unautomate Your Finances
Elsewhere, our very own Adam Baker has just released his first e-book, Unautomate Your Finances, which lays out his personal financial philosophy. This e-book is not free. It costs $17, but comes with Baker’s “as long as I have a pulse” guarantee. (If you’re not satisfied, send him an e-mail and he’ll refund your money as long as he’s still alive.)
Baker believes that the more you simplify your financial life, the easier it is to control it. He’s not necessarily opposed to all automation, but believes that for many of us, automation breeds more complexity than simplicity. He argues that in most cases, automating our financial lives magnifies existing problems, and we’d be better off un-automating things: spending consciously, making sustainable choices, and focusing on our goals.
Along the way, Baker shares solid personal-finance advice on saving for emergencies, coping with credit, and creating a realistic budget. Is Unautomate Your Finances right for you? I don’t know. But since it comes with a money-back guarantee, it’s certainly worth a look!
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“He argues that in most cases, automating our financial lives magnifies existing problems, and we’d be better off un-automating things…”
This is a great point, which is applicable in many areas of life. Automation locks in a system. Automating a good system can save effort, but automating a bad system can lock in problems. Or to put it another way, as Peter Drucker did, “There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.”
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I’m not sure if I see how that is going to work. We just plain forget to pay bills (and we actually have very very few of them). I found that automating my finances made it much less expensive since we were paying a lot of late fees and had the money to pay the bills all along.
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Having not read the e-book I don’t know exactly what’s in it, but I can say that for me, automation is fabulous. The only automatically-paid bills are the ones that are exactly the same each month. And I also have money automatically put into different savings accounts each month. If I had to manually put that $1000 somewhere, I might be tempted to spend more each month. In our case, “out of sight, out of mind” is a good philosophy.
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I think, if nothing else, some automation is worth removing, like automatic cable bills and rental services, because you notice price increases and see the money as it goes out each month. Sure, you may want to automate the trash and sewer, a mortgage payment, and savings plans. But do you want to be in the dark… when your electricity bill jumps 30%?
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I have to admit I’m always a little skeptical when someone from the government tries to tell me how to protect myself…. they don’t exactly have a great track record at anything.
I haven’t read the other ebook, but automating bill payments can be a potentially dangerous thing if the bills aren’t verified and can cause a loss of discipline controlling expenses. On the other hand, automatic investing is a good thing and before you know it you don’t even miss the money anymore.
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I think there is validity to unautomating your finances… atleast when I physically write the check.. I FEEL IT… out of sight is out of mind and often leaves you with that… “Where did my money go” feeling… if you scrutinize the bills you get while the payment is automated then maybe thats enough but I’m interested to see what Baker has to say on the subject.
Jeff
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Very interesting books indeed. I’m gonna order the handbook now and see what kind of advices they have. There’ll probably be some hidden stuffs that most people don’t know about, so it’s definitely worth a look (and it’s free +D).
Unautomate your finances seems like an intriguing ebook. I wonder what Baker has to say about unautomation =)
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I’ve read the guide and I loved it! I’m definitely someone who loves automation, but Baker brings out some good points on how we can be missing out on improving our finances by ‘just setting and forgetting’.
Baker explains how automation without consciousness, sustainability, and focus can add stress rather than reduce it.
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“…He argues that in most cases, automating our financial lives magnifies existing problems, and we’d be better off un-automating things: spending consciously, making sustainable choices, and focusing on our goals…”
Spending conciously… That’s exactly how I feel. I prefer doing things manually. I pay all my bills one by one, manually over the internet. I’ve never really been able to put my finger on exactly why I prefer doing this but it’s clear to me now that I do it because I’m more aware of how much I spend and where.
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I agree whole-heartedly with “unautomating your finances” as many companies have a track-record of raising costs and adding hidden fees without our knowledge. If each & every bill is scrutinized correctly & efficiently, you will be more likely to catch errors, reconsider unecessary expidentures, as well as catching potential cases of identity theft.
Let’s be honest: If we’re REALLY serious about maintaining our finances, I’m certain we can create at least an hour of time a month (turn that TV off for a bit!) to reconcile our bank statements and payments.
@ #5 << I too am quite skeptical about what the government considers to be “good products” as we lay in a capitalist system with many unforseen vested interests at hand.
“Plan like a pessimist to live like an optmimist” is my mantra.
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I don’t like automating payments. Some of my monthly reocurring bill companies effectively require me to automate payments (otherwise they charge me an arm and a leg for me to send in cash or a check). I much prefer to pay online each month with one-time payments. That way, I can review my account, the billing statement, and can choose my payment method. With automated billing, it’s a pain in the butt for me to track when my debits will be pulled from my account, and I have to remember to keep a minimum balance in the account to cover those debts. Then, if I decide to close an account, I have to remember which companies are pulling from that account and let them know to start billing me some other way. Argh!
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Just the fact that the free 2010 Consumer Action Handbook contains info on identity theft is a good thing. I have found that too many people have no clue as to how to protect themselves from identity thieves and the methods that they use.
William Wilkie
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Agreeing with a lot of others … I recently set up an auto-pay on one account, but it makes me twitchy! I’m gonna cancel it. I want to make that payment with intention every month.
One thing that I’ve automated that I plan to leave in place is a transfer from checking to savings each pay period. The other is my life insurance premiums. One is charged to a credit card and the other to my checking account.
Using tools like online bill pay can increase efficiency so much that it leaves a person more time to be conscious of what’s going on with the money. I’ll bet most of us here are people who really are at the point of wanting to have our eyes on each transaction.
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Screw that. I automate everything. There is too much effort wasted paying bills by hand. Also, they’re bills. You have to pay them. It’s not like you can say, gee my electric bill went up $100, I’ll just not pay it this month.
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