“You may not realize it, but lenders don’t just hand out money, it always comes at a price.” Should a guide to credit cards and loans be any less direct? This book, which is chock-full of practical advice around how to pay bills on time, shop using discounts, and cut back on spending to meet one’s budget, is a helpful toolbox for fledgling young adult consumers. Sanderson acknowledges credit card rewards and perks but offers more frequent warnings about the consequences of credit misuse. Following the primer on credit cards is a section about all kinds of loans, including installment, personal, auto, student, and mortgage. The book covers snowball and avalanche methods of paying off debt along with debt consolidation. Photos, graphics, and text boxes appear throughout, breaking up the chunks of text into digestible nuggets. Recap pages helpfully remind readers of the main ideas they’ve encountered in each section, providing a handy lifeline for readers who may blanch at financial concepts, vocabulary, and equations for figuring out interest. A warning about raising one’s credit limit raises a minor contradiction over advice about credit utilization ratios, but otherwise this is a sound manual for getting one’s bearings about debt.
