Review: Picking Yourself Up and Starting All Over Again
- By Gary Dale Cearley
- Published January 15, 2009
- Self Help
Gary Dale Cearley
Reviewer Gary Dale Cearley is an expatriate American who chooses to write about controversial material. His subject matter tends to run the gamut from historical subjects to biography and even humor. Originally from Arkansas, he has spent several years in Korea as well as Vietnam and is now living in Thailand.Â
View all articles by Gary Dale Cearley
Author: Paul B. Beckwith
ISBN: 10: 1844016269 ISBN:13: 978-1844016266
Do you operate on a budget? And if so do you keep within the budget? Do you find yourself scrambling to figure out where your salary has gone after only a short week or two into the month? Maybe this book is for you…
Paul Beckwith’s book, Picking Yourself Up and
Starting All Over Again, is rather short, only 70 odd pages, but it
is full of good advice on how not to go broke. In many ways it
is written more like a pamphlet and even has almost the feel of one.
In a way this is the beauty of the book. Anyone who wants to
pretty much can make it through in one sitting. Beckwith has
provided many tables inside the book to illustrate the points that he
is pushing about spending habits. One thing I did notice though
was that the author didn’t spend a whole lot of time talking about
saving and investing but rather spent most of the book describing how
to steer one’s spending back on course. And there is nothing
wrong with that!
When I originally picked up this book I thought that it was actually for someone who had hit rock bottom – someone who’d actually gone bankrupt and is being forced to pick up the pieces of their lives. Actually though, Paul Beckwith has written the book for people who are overspending and need to get back within their boundaries. The author gives many examples where fat can be trimmed out of the readers’ budgets and he even proffers advice on determining whether or not the reader is actually in the right profession.
The book is good for anyone but seems to be written
more for those readers based in the United Kingdom. Paul
Beckwith is a professional financial expert in the United Kingdom so
his advice, although brief, comes with a back up of a lot of
experience about the spending habits of modern day Britons. The
advice is given in straightforward, almost dry language that is in a
typically more formal style than it would have been written perhaps
if the author was an American. But this is no reason whatsoever
to not read the book. I found the book very handy at giving
small tips on where to look in my life for the “financial waste”.
And although I am not in debt I do believe that much of Beckwith’s
advice about spending pertained directly to me. He’s very
much a waste not, want not sort of guy.