Book Review: The Financial Diet

05.27.2022 - By: Anastasia Barbuzzi

#RequiredReading refers to $HMONEY’s official book club. I review books in the personal finance genre several times a month, including titles related to personal finance such as lifestyle and mindset books. Have a book you want me to review before you dive in yourself? Send me a message! Happy to have you join in on the fun and learning 💚

Overview of The Financial Diet

You might recognize The Financial Diet (TFD) as "the place where (hopefully) you will start talking about money for the first time in a way that doesn't feel scary, judgmental, or boring as hell."

TFD's popular Youtube channel may come to mind when you hear the brand's name, or perhaps The Financial Diet: A Total Beginner's Guide to Getting Good with Money rings a bell, the book by co-founders Chelsea Fagan and Lauren Ver Hage.

Chelsea Fagan is a writer and the co-founder of TFD. She began her writing career at Thought Catalog before founding TFD as a personal blog in 2014. A college dropout, she's written for The Atlantic, Cosmopolitan, VICE, and Grantland.

Lauren Ver Hage is an art director and the co-founder of TFD. An expert in visual communication design, Ver Hage worked as an art director at an advertising agency and a freelance designer for Nickelodeon before co-founding TFD.

Published in 2018, The Financial Diet reads just like the online platform, in a "guide to life" format. With thousands of articles about investing on a budget to what foods are worth the organic price tag, TFD itself is part lifestyle blog, part personal finance resource.

Praised for her relatable tone and humorous personality, Fagan embellishes The Financial Diet with amusing details such as her "don't you fucking dares" (a set of personal finance no-nos). For example, "DYFD not check your account balance at least twice a week."

Overall, The Financial Diet promises to teach you:

how to get good with money in a year
the ingredients everyone needs to have a budget-friendly kitchen
how to talk about awkward money stuff with your friends
the best way to make (and stick to!) a budget
how to take care of your house like a grown-up
what the hell it means to invest (and how you can do it)

*Note: there’s swearing throughout the book!

Theme

The Financial Diet explores one central theme: our relationship to our finances. This theme is analyzed further by discussing seven different topics: budgeting, investing, career, food, home, love, and action.

This book promotes that being smarter with money isn’t just about what you put in the bank. It’s about everything– from the clothes in your closet to the food in your fridge. Therefore, The Financial Diet stands for making positive changes to all aspects of your life to gain greater financial well-being and understanding.

In the author’s note, they make it a point to mention that The Financial Diet is intended solely as a source of inspiration and information for readers who wish to take charge of creating a healthier financial future for themselves.

Design & Structure

Let's put it this way: The Financial Diet's cover is something that many millennials would gravitate to in the personal finance section of the bookstore. It's simple and without a lot of text. Plus, it catches your eye with its salmon pink colour.

On the inside, The Financial Diet contains a ton of cute, kitschy illustrations by the artist Eve Mobley. The book's pages are painted in many different colours and are drawn on in several different fonts. You certainly won't get bored flipping through it.

When it comes to the book's structure, each chapter of the book is prefaced by introducing a new topic (budgeting, investing, etc.). Then, more information is provided about each topic in infographics, step-by-step instructions, and short interviews with expert commentators. This format makes the book very easy to follow.

Awards & Accolades: The Financial Diet

a Refinery29 Best Book of 2018
one of Real Simple's Most Inspiring Books for Graduates
an Indie Personal Finance Bestseller

Goodreads Snapshot 📸: The Financial Diet

I refer to Goodreads, a platform for authors, publishers, and bookworms, for a variety of ratings and reviews. Keep up with my reading list here!

What People Are Saying About The Financial Diet

As you can tell from the snapshot above, reader’s opinions about The Financial Diet are quite skewed, with most of them around the 4 and 3-star mark. Let’s start with a fair 3-star review from Goodreads:

“Informative, but I wish some of the chapters had gone more in depth. Clearly geared at someone who has no idea what to do with money (i.e. first step: open a 401k) and not as much someone who has the initial bases covered and is looking to go to the next level (like investing).

BUT I really loved the chapters on careers and relationships, both had great advice. And I also appreciated their stance that being good with money isn't about depriving yourself, but about knowing where your money is going and spending it with intention. So you CAN have your avocado toast and eat it too…”

So, that 3-star reviewer wished for a bit more detail on some of the important concepts throughout the book, however, when it comes to the lifestyle bits, they seemed to connect with the material.

Now, let’s take a look at a 2-star review: “I liked the first part of this book, about making a budget and investing for retirement. I assumed the rest of the book would offer a deeper dive into those useful topics, but instead it gave pretty surface advice from a privileged standpoint.”

The 2-star reviewer also said, “I skipped the part about Sex and the City, which seemed irrelevant. Overall, not a complete waste of time, but I skimmed most of it.”

Similar to the first reviewer, the second reviewer hoped for a little more substance from The Financial Diet. This time though, they found the author’s advice and SATC references to be unrelatable.

For a lot of TFD YouTube fans, the book “missed the mark”. And for readers with a high degree of financial literacy, the frilly details including the artwork, glossy pages, and millennial pink design, were considered more of a focal point than the actual information printed.

That said, some TFD followers saw the book as an extension of the blog. They think it successfully illustrates how our relationship with money is connected to our career, personal style, diet, home, and many other areas of our lifestyle.

On that note, let’s go over a 5-star review together: “I appreciated the accessibility of the book to a complete novice in the financial field. Explanations were very well phrased and the numerous anecdotes and interviews provided a wide range of viewpoints and catered to the specific areas I was curious about while giving me an overview of financial aspects I had never considered.”

The 5-star reviewer continued, “As a millennial/ gen-z this book was a wonderful jumping off point for me and I would highly recommend it to other people with financial dreams but no concrete understanding of what that looks like in our quickly changing world.”

With that, I’ll let you in on what I learned from The Financial Diet.

Key Takeaways from The Financial Diet 🌟

As I mentioned earlier in this review, The Financial Diet examines our relationship to our personal finances through discussing 7 different topics: budgeting, investing, career, food, home, love, and action.

I believe that one key takeaway from the book stems off the topic of love, and is extremely important for young women entering serious relationships to understand.

Fagan’s lesson on “how to be a Miranda, not a Carrie'' sticks out, although I’m unsure of how effective her money-and-relationships advice is in the context of SATC. However, there is a powerful message transmitted through this chapter: there’s nothing more cringeworthy than having a relationship be your financial plan.

Therefore, being able to rely on yourself financially is absolutely essential to your security as an adult. Which leads me to my next key takeaway…

I’m still unsure about the language Fagan uses in this next statement, but she makes the message clear: “We should all strive to reach a level of openness, compassion, and serious personal boundaries when it comes to navigating money and love, and realize that talking about money doesn’t make us assholes–not talking about money makes us idiots.”

I agree that setting boundaries around money and love is important, like making sure you have personal finances you can rely on that are separate from your romantic partner.

In the end, talking about money has always been viewed as cocky and unnecessary, but not talking about it adds to the money taboo, further preventing us from feeling like we can open up about it.

As Anna Breslaw, author and former Cosmopolitan editor, confirms in the book, it sounds crazy, but people are more open to talking about sex than money. This fact has been a part of $HMONEY’s pitch deck from the beginning: more millennial women are comfortable with talking about their sex lives than their salaries.

“It seems almost a ridiculous comparison to make, but the ease with which many of us discuss the physical aspects of relationships only serves to highlight the restrictions we have about money talk,” Breslaw said.

“We feel comfortable saying, ‘Women should demand orgasms,’ and yet we don't think (or say), ‘Women should demand their own, separate emergency fund in a relationship.’ We can think of a million boundaries and standards that we should have when it comes to the emotional and sexual parts of love, and yet be totally wthout those same standards for our finances.”

In other words, it’s time to normalize conversations about money– and increase our financial standards as women.

The Makes vs The Misses: The Financial Diet

Before I wrap-up this review, I’ll give you a brief summary of what I think made or missed the mark in The Financial Diet. Let me know if you agree with the points below in the comments!

The Makes

encourages readers to be creative about the ways they budget, promotes that budgeting can and should be beautiful
downloadable resources available
real-life examples from successful budgeters
information from knowledgeable and credible experts
urges readers to find multiple streams of fulfillment, not just income
lots of helpful tips & tricks for young women who are on the precipice of “adulting”, like recipes
great career advice

The Misses

theme lost throughout, particularly in the home section and parts of the career section
the information on subjects like investing may not be enough to actually teach someone how to invest
glossary at the back of the book is very short, could’ve been fleshed out
based on the unfortunate use of a wellness-y metaphor for budgeting, a.k.a The Financial Diet

Conclusion

All in all, I think The Financial Diet is a good read for women entering and graduating college. Indeed, “being young is like having a secret cheat code to increasing your wealth, because your money has a much longer time to grow.”

I agree with Fagan that there is a life’s work to be found in making finance and professional literacy something all women can participate in. The Financial Diet asks women to quiz themselves about the little things, like where they want to go and where they want to live and answer honestly.

To add, The Financial Diet preaches that being smarter with money isn’t just about what you put in the bank. Therefore, The Financial Diet stands for making positive changes to all areas of your life to gain greater financial well-being.

Unfortunately, the book’s overarching theme was lost in moments when it strayed so far from actually getting good with money and budgeting in general (ex. advising readers to buy an “upscale work bag”).

It would be understandable to suggest that a higher quality bag will last longer, but the way this piece of advice is presented makes it seem as if buying from a luxury label is the move if you will.

There’s three things that made me question this advice:

How many readers are able to afford a “nice bag,” especially if they’re reading this book to go on a financial diet? (In other words, how helpful is this advice?)
If you’re going to suggest buying an upscale purse to pull a work outfit together, wouldn’t providing a sample budget for how to secure that bag be more helpful to readers?
Although the expert advisor in this chapter, fashion editor Tyler McCall, mentions that you don’t have to buy a bag from a luxury label, why would she be suggesting that you buy a “nice bag” at all? To impress others?

And if you’re wondering what I mean by the book being “based on the unfortunate use of a wellness-y metaphor for budgeting,” let me explain. What I mean is that while budgeting can require us to reprioritize our spending or eliminate something from our budget entirely, going on a financial diet proposes restricting your spending.

Even if it’s just the platform’s name or the book’s, “The Financial Diet” sounds counterintuitive to a brand that champions a “happiness allocation” budgeting method.

Fave Quotes 💬

“Put a value on your time, and start measuring your wealth not in money but in freedom.”
“We are all the CEOs of our own lives, and that means every hour should be accounted for and well compensated, according to our own personal standards of wealth and happiness.”
“The mantra of “I deserve to try” is perhaps the biggest weapon we have against the inherent unfairness of the universe.”
“Know that you will have a million different passions and desires and dreams in life and that being savvy with money will be the difference between never giving yourself permission to pursue them and being able to live them out.”

Where to Buy The Financial Diet

Where to Follow The Financial Diet

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LEARN MORE ON $HMONEY RADIO

#RequiredReading refers to $HMONEY’s official book club. I review books in the personal finance genre several times a month, including titles related to personal finance such as lifestyle and mindset books. Have a book you want me to review before you dive in yourself? Send me a message! Happy to have you join in on the fun and learning 💚