I reviewed The Behavior Gap for credit.com.
Would you take financial advice from a cocktail napkin sketch? Well, it depends on who is sketching. If it's your brother-in-law, who likes to boast about how he "almost" made a killing investing in Google stock, then the advice is probably not worth the paper it's on. But if it happens to be sketched by Carl Richards, a financial planner and blogger on the New York Times' Bucks blog, then it's a good idea to save the napkin and wipe your barbecue wing sauce covered fingers on your pants instead.
Richards' sketches (you can find them all here) offer practical financial advice in the form of humorous (at times darkly humorous) graphs that get to the essence of peoples' oftentimes troubled relationship with money and credit. For instance, Richards has a graph that charts the increase in the price of gold in relationship to the chance you will get hurt. That line climbs at a steady 45-degree angle.
Richards' new book, The Behavior Gap: Simple Ways to Stop Doing Dumb Things with Money combines napkin sketch graphs with financial advice that focuses on reducing fear, making realistic choices, and learning to accept the fact that life rarely goes as planned.
