The Financial Feminist

I checked this book out of the library.

Before raving about the guide I’ll bring up one glaring issue.

Author Tori Dunlap talks about ESG investing–Environmentally and Socially Responsible Investment Funds.

The Republicans in the U.S. government enacted a law to make ESG investing illegal.

In Effect you cannot decide for yourself what companies to invest your hard-earned money in.

These kinds of “Social Choice” funds do not invest money in fossil fuel companies, gun manufacturer, or the weapons industry among other businesses like these.

It would’ve become illegal to invest in companies that put people and the planet before the greed that creates deplorable conditions for workers everywhere.

LL Cool Joe–President Joe Biden–did one thing right. He vetoed the act that made ESG Investing illegal.

So as of today we can invest our money where we’d like if we so choose to invest our money in the stock market.

Should a Republican become president we can kiss this free choice goodbye.

Other than this reality that I was compelled to point out Tori Dunlap’s book should be required reading for those of us–even clueless guys–who need this kind of financial help.

Some of us love balancing our accounts and are aware of exactly what our account balances are on any given day. Not everyone needs to read The Financial Feminist.

Either way I recommend this book to everyone.

The difference is Tori Dunlap’s tone of voice is warm and empathetic. Unlike other personal finance authors she asks you not only to record one month’s worth of purchases. Dunlap tells you to write down why you bought the items and how you felt when you paid for them.

The second part that I liked was the chapter where you create financial goals with a mission and timeline that you want to achieve and how to fund this objective.

After that I stopped reading the book and skimmed only the interviews she featured with other women.

One woman was African American and stated point-blank that if she didn’t budget enough money for grooming her credibility would be trashed interacting with employers.

In one other finance book I read and can recommend the author claimed you didn’t need to adhere to a budget at all. Which makes sense. His belief was that you can use your money “to have anything you want–you just can’t have everything.”

So for some of us we’re going to splash cash on makeup at Sephora. Others are naturally inclined to shop at Walmart for Flower Beauty by Drew Barrymore.

The beef that Tori Dunlap has is that women are told to save money and stop spending frivolously. Men are told to invest money and accrue wealth. This fact is evident in the kinds of results that are given when women and men search on this topic on the internet. Different methods are shown for women than the ones for men in the search results.

I check out a lot of personal finance books from the library. First I check to see if a woman wrote the book. In one guide I checked out a woman told women readers to deduct car loan payments on the tax refund when you used your car for a business. Should every women want to be an entrepreneur? How is that advice supposed to help ordinary woman?

The Financial Feminist is the best book of its kind. Even for readers who are shrewd investors or veritable wealth wizards I recommend reading this Tori Dunlap book.

I’ll end here with the best personal finance books I’ve read:

Balance: How to Invest for Happiness, Health, and Wealth. Andrew Hallam, 2022.

Good Money Revolution: How to Make More Money to Do More Good. Derrick Kinney, 2022.

Money Strong: Your Guide to a Life Free of Financial Worries. Liz Davidson 2023.

Simple Money: A No-nonsense Guide to Personal Finance. Tim Maurer 2016.

Everything You Know About Money is Wrong: Overcome the Financial Myths Keeping You from the Life You Want. Karen Ramsay, 2001.

Happy Money. The Science of Happier Spending. Elizabeth Dunn & Michael Norton, 2014.

The Next Millionaire Next Door. Thomas J. Stanley & Sarah Stanley Fallaw, 2020.

The Smartest Retirement Book You’ll Ever Read. Daniel R. Solin, 2010.

We Should All Be Millionaires: A Women’s Guide to Earning More, Building Wealth, and Gaining Economic Power. Rachel Rodgers, 2021.

Invest Like You Give a Damn: Make Money, Change the World, Sleep Well at Night. Marc de Sousa Shields, 2017.

Your Essential Guide to Sustainable Investing: How to Live Your Values and Achieve Your Financial Goals with ESG, SRI, and Impact Investing. Larry E. Swedroe 2022.

Again the Republicans in the U.S. government are trying to make this kind of investing illegal. Thus this book might become obsolete if a Republican becomes president.

The Ultimate Retirement Guide for 50+. Suze Orman, 2020.

The only Suze Orman book I recommend. She reduced an adult man to tears in a personal finance DVD where she was giving advice to audience members. She berated him for going to school to get a degree to have a new career. She told him he could’ve done fine in life by remaining a waiter for the rest of his life. What if he wanted to do something else? I was unemployed and had no job when I was back to school to obtain a Masters degree. Suze Orman is against doing this. Take what she says with a grain of salt. In her 50+ retirement guide she appeared to redeem herself with solid advice.

Why Should White Guys Have All the Wealth? How You Can Become a Millionaire Starting from the Bottom. Cedric Nash 2023

Sundressed

The 2023 book above I checked out of the library.

The author advocates for wearing natural fabrics that make us feel good wearing them.

She picks up where Maxine Bedat left off in Unravelled: The Life and Death of a Garment.

Lucianne Tonti explores the production process of wool, cotton, silk, linen and other natural fabrics.

How the creating buying and long-term wear of these clothes can be made truly sustainable with regenerative farming of flax cotton and sheep.

After reading Sundressed I knew that as sound as my habits have become I could do more going forward.

Dismayed I was to realize a costly J.Crew coat I bought (at a reduced yet not cheap cost) was not 100 percent wool.

Sometimes it takes reading a book or overhearing a conversation on the train to get a light bulb to go off in your head.

Feminist AF

Buy or check out of the library the book above.

It should be essential reading whatever your age race or gender if you want your eyes opened.

The book is geared to Brown and Black teenage girls to get empowered.

I checked it out of the library and read it in two hours. What an eye opener.

Though if you’re not in the demographic of the readers for this book perhaps you know a young girl you can gift this book to.

What you don’t see exists whether you can see it or not from your Point of View.

There’s two sides to every story.

We should each of us bring our truth to light.

In New York City it’s illegal for an employer to discriminate against a worker because of the person’s hairstyle.

Across America high school dress codes prohibit girls from wearing their hair in box braids.

In multiple U.S. states laws were passed making free speech a crime when you’re talking about what a Black author wrote in a book.

Summer Boismer a teacher was fired because she gave her students the link to the Brooklyn Public Library Books Unbanned Teen e-book library card application.

The Free Service allows teens 13-21 in all 50 states to check out e-book versions of books that have been banned in Texas and elsewhere.

Apply for the Free Teen Books Unbanned Library Card or give this link to a young person who would be interested..

This is America: Land of the Free because of the Brave authors librarians and educators who are acting to free everybody to think for ourselves.

Intellectual Freedom is the cornerstone of public libraries everywhere. Or should be when Conservative gatekeepers limit access to books and knowledge.

Feminist AF? I’ve always been.

Let Love Rule

The bell hooks book Communion has a copyright date of 2002. Even though the book is old it stands the test of time. Bell hooks was focusing on healing through acting with love. Her positive spin was refreshing.

Hooks claimed love cannot be had without justice. This fomented in me the idea that justice requires love.

Truth-telling is an act of love. To obtain justice we must tell the truth. In a society without love, no one is free of domination. Oppression thrives in a loveless world.

After the Buffalo shooting, I thought about taking down this blog and ending it. Those of us with Black family members worry for their lives after what happened.

Two weeks before my fifty-seventh birthday I realized it was time to do what Lenny Kravitz titled his song: “Let Love Rule.”

Thinking that by acting out of love I would generate the love I wanted to see in the world.

Let’s face it: none of us can control what people think of us. Nor how they feel about you and me. We must focus on our lives our goals and our actions.

Given the chance to create a new and better living history I would take it.

So–I’m keeping up this blog. Only I might post here every so often. As I’m gearing up to publish a second book–a career book–that will go on pre-order status online hopefully in the early summer.

What do you say? Don’t you think we should give love a chance?

The Life and Death of a Garment

This book I read circa 5 months ago.

It’s a fascinating and compelling expose of the life cycle of clothing.

Maxine Bedat takes the reader on a trip from the cotton field to the manufacturing plant to the store shelves.

If you wondered like I did how a cotton ball becomes a pair of jeans or a shirt (or how fabric becomes an item of clothing like a coat) Bedat shows us with step-by-step photos of the production process.

This curious glimpse exposes the dirty truth about the toxic working conditions and filthy physical environments of overseas garment manufacturing.

60 women (all women!) sit in rows of tables at cramped sewing machines. One woman sews the jean hem. The next sews the leg. And the next sews the waistband. On down the line it goes.

Giving way to the term “deaths of despair” that occur when work is not meaningful and doesn’t give you a purpose for getting up out of bed.

The root lies in the neoliberal economic policies that offloaded clothing production to other countries.

In the guise of giving the residents a better life. When in fact it allowed American businesses to pay cut-rate wages in order to reap billions in sales.

My tactic is to rarely buy an item of clothing from Zara or H&M. Should I be shopping in those stores at all?

This spring and going into the summer I won’t be buying any new clothes.

On tap is a pair of blue fabric booties I would like to buy. That’s all.

In March I sent donation bags off to the Salvation Army.

In the coming blog entry, I would like to talk about how I finally made peace with my disobedient hair.

Fulfillment

I have just read the book Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America.

Alec MacGillis the investigative journalist exposed the dark side of the Amazon.com reign over retail.

Employees have gotten killed working at Amazon warehouses.

Jeff Bezos pays lobbyists millions of dollars to get elected leaders in Washington and elsewhere to do his bidding.

The million-dollar tax breaks given to Amazon to build its warehouses everywhere in the U.S. turn into higher taxes imposed on residents of areas where Amazon sets up camp.

No–I haven’t ever been a fan of Liberals. I detest them as much as I despise Conservatives. The fact that Democrat leaders cozy up to Jeff Bezos will be no secret when you read Fulfillment.

Yes–I have decided it’s too risky and unethical to shop on Amazon anymore.

I use Amazon’s books category to search for new books. Then I order the books from a local independent bookseller to pick up at the store.

Fulfillment exposes the regional economic inequality that is at the root of the income divide in America. Where you live determines your income level and your prospects in life.

It explains how people in rural and other disadvantaged areas voted for Mr. Toupee / Donald Trump.

Another book that I haven’t read exposed the dark side of Mr. Toupee’s Economic Development Zones. That book’s author alleged the ordinary citizens living there were fleeced not given great jobs.

It begs the question that the tide is rising for no one in America regardless of who we elect.

Fulfillment ends with the author’s hope that Joe Biden will regulate Amazon and other big businesses. I doubt this corrective action will happen.

Coming up I will talk about my private reckoning with the stuff I own. Firsthand I have seen incontrovertible proof that how you dress can heal or harm you.

Never mind the harm done to workers in sweatshops and the pollution of waterways and farmland with chemical waste from clothing production.

Though we should care about this.

Wow–I discovered another bona fide reason for caring about your clothes. How you dress can hold you back or help you grow.

This is a radical idea that no one in the sustainable fashion brigade has talked about: How limiting your clothing choices can spark more joy, energy, and opportunity in your life than you’ve ever had before.

Let’s face it: this self-interested motivation is a great gateway to choosing and using wardrobe items with care and attention.

My journey to freedom and happiness started this month when I filled up four donation bags with clothes, jewelry, and barely worn shoes.

The connection between what I bought and how I felt was the wake-up call for doing things differently.

Living with Less

The red cover of the captioned book belies the standard white barren aesthetic of mainstream minimalism.

Christine Platt received 4.8 stars out of 5.0 on Amazon for this Avant Garde rendering of Living with Less.

The book is only 207 pages.

Everyone should read it when you want to attain a minimalist lifestyle. In the face of temptation to bow into consumer culture and spend spend spend.

I’m impressed with Platt who is an Advocate and Storyteller for her peers in the African diaspora.

Proud of my Italian heritage I get empowered by Platt’s adoration of her culture. To advocate for what I called in here and use as a blog Category Conscious Chic.

At the same time I read the Afrominimalist’s Guide to Living with Less I watched a Suze Orman retirement planning TV show on Channel 13.

Orman told her audience to cut down spending today to be able to live on less money after you retire.

This advice to live on less right now resonated with me.

As hard as it is to do this I’m going to nix buying a fab cashmere sweater that’s on sale.

Christine Platt copped to owning 53 pairs of jeans.

Reading that she had 53 pairs of jeans put my own clothes collection in perspective.

I have 6 pairs of jeans. Two of them I wear in the summer. The others I wear year-round.

What I do have in bulk are warm sweaters. New York City is cold for 8 months of the year. One sweater I’m donating to charity. Another I’ll pitch in the garbage because it has a permanent stain.

Unlike the white influencer minimalists who champion a barren aesthetic of (costly!) furniture in neutral colors Platt endorses living with less in terms of having an Authentic and Intentional life ethic.

Her wardrobe palette is colorful and reflects her African roots.

Go on the Afrominimalist website for more details.

Rebel Love Book

Beauty lies in having radical self-acceptance. In owning your terrific soul. In honoring and trying to heal the broken parts and loving all of the pieces of you.

I believe in the beauty of everyone’s true self-expression. Not to feel guilty or ashamed for being who you are.

The book shown above by Dr. Chris Donaghue, PhD is revolutionary. It’s sad that what he’s talking about isn’t accepted as the norm.

I’ll quote from the last sentence on the last page to get readers to go out and buy this guide:

“Being the truest, most authentic version of yourself is ultimately what will transform you and your relationships–and eventually, maybe even the world.”

Dr. Chris asserts that in countries where there is a sex-positive tone and permissive view of sexuality there are fewer rapes, sexual assaults, and teen pregnancies.