A New York Times correspondent shares his financial successes and mishaps, offering an everyman´s guide to straightening out your money once and for all. Money management is one of our most practical survival skills--and also one we´ve convinced ourselves we´re either born with or not. In reality, financial planning can be learned, like anything else. Part financial memoir and part research-based guide to attaining lifelong security, This Is the Year I Put My Financial Life in Order is the book that everyone who has never wanted to read a preachy financial guide has been waiting for. John Schwartz and his wife, Jeanne, are pre-retirement workers of an economic class well above the poverty line, but well below the one percent. Sharing his own alternately harrowing and hilarious stories--from his brush with financial ruin and bankruptcy in his thirties to his short-lived budgeted diet of cafeteria french fries and gravy--John will walk you through his own journey to financial literacy, which he admittedly started a bit late. He covers everything from investments to retirement and insurance to wills (at fifty-eight, he didn´t have one!), medical directives and more. Whether you´re a college grad wanting to start out on the right foot or you´re approaching retirement age and still wondering what a 401(K) is, This Is the Year I Put My Financial Life in Order will help you become your own best financial adviser.