Ask someone what "finance" means to him or her. You're probably going to get a variety of answers: "It's about cash." "It's what my bank is doing." "The New York Stock Exchange has something to do with it." "It's how businesses and people get the money they need— you know, invest, and stuff like that."

Finance is a wide area. It includes both national and international banking systems and business financing. It also deals with the phase you are going through in order to obtain a car loan and what a company is doing for its future needs.

We live in a world that encourages us to wastefully spend, accumulate more than we need, and postpone things like savings in retirement until we are essentially retired. It's easy to look around us and see all the things we can buy to become the person we want to be, and treat tax liability as the antisocial people's exclusive domain. But in creating and running TFD on a daily basis, I found that the first concrete steps to becoming the kind of individual who is "good with money" are pretty easy and straightforward— these are the basics to getting good (which you will learn in this book) with money in a year.

Have you charged a late credit card fee in the past year or bounced a check?

Have you lost an invoice, report, or other financial record you urgently needed to find? Are you uncertain about how much coverage to pay, what health plan to choose from, the right way to save for college or retirement?

Would you ever like to have less time to worry about money?

The good news is that hope remains. You can win your choices, streamline your financial systems, and control your money. A couple of hours spent with this book and a little time invested in today's personal finance technology can put you on track for your goals and ease your anxiety about the details that might otherwise make you trip up.