User Reviews
Rating: really liked it
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This isn't the type of book I would normally obtain for myself, but I'm a huge fan of Gaby Dunn and have been ever since her BuzzFeed days, so in a show of support, I downloaded the book from Netgalley and read it without adding it as "currently reading" on Goodreads just in case it wasn't the type of book that I wanted to move forward with.
As others have mentioned, BAD WITH MONEY is equal parts memoir and financial self-help guide. Some people seemed put out by the memoir parts, and I can see how if you were looking for something solidly informational, that could be annoying. Personally, I thought her struggles with loans, over-spending parents, and lack of college resources made her relatable and gave her cred. It was like, "Look, I've struggled and seriously regret some of the mistakes I made that have made my current situation so difficult. Let me tell you how I fucked up so
you don't."
I honestly would recommend this to older teens who are just about to start college (or are already in college). My mom told me a lot of this stuff already, but there were still things I didn't know (text messages count as wills in some states?!). Dunn gives some pretty great advice on a wide array of topics ranging from "is your unpaid internship a scam?" to "intro to tax forms 101" to the hidden costs of weddings and babies to "millennials are destroying everything: a baby-boomer story"-type clickbait bullshit opinion pieces.
People love to talk about how millennials are the over-privileged, lazy generation - one that they usually envision as a white, blonde, upper middle-class stereotype decked out in Anthropologie and sucking down on a customized Starbucks drink while using ten unfathomable apps expertly on the Pixel 3. The sad reality is that a lot of millennials can't afford health insurance, spend most of their paychecks on rent, are overqualified for the jobs they perform, weighed down by student loans, and find themselves without property, much less a well-balanced checkbook. They live in a tanked economy that was spoiled by the generation that came before them, and that generation continues to do its damnedest to continue to make their lives hell by mocking them for eating avocado toast.
The fact of the matter is, being a millennial is hard. There's no easy entre into adult life, and as much as we're sneered at for not knowing how to "adult," a lot of this stuff
isn't taught in schools, and if you aren't lucky enough to have a parent or guardian figure who's willing to walk you through this kind of stuff, you might be SOL the next time you apply for a credit card or file your W2.
I enjoyed BAD WITH MONEY. The balance of memoir and instruction guide doesn't always quite work, but she says what she has to say with candor and a ready willingness to help.
Thanks to Netgalley/the publisher for the review copy! 3 stars
Rating: really liked it
More entertaining than educationalThe book started out with a lot of promise. Dunn talked about her family's relationship with money and how that impacted her life. I thought the book would be an exploration of how to not be bad with money. It was more Dunn talking about how bad she was with money with some bits of advice thrown in. I guess I wanted more educational content.
If you are looking for a hilarious memoir that is centered around money you will enjoy this. If you are looking for practical ways to be better with money, this book might not be it.
Rating: really liked it
While I found this book enjoyable, I was hoping for more instruction than anecdote from it. Gaby Dunn has written a fun book about living the best you can and trying to figure out the personal and societal issue that is money. She talks a lot about herself and her family and friends, in order to put us all at ease, but I wanted just a little more hard facts and info. As a reading book I would definitely pick this, especially as an audiobook or beach read.
Rating: really liked it
Every 18 old should read this. The evils of school loans, making emotional decisions on where we go to college, consumer credit wickedness, the truth about credit, saving and budgeting.
Rating: really liked it
I could pretty much always use 200+ pages of someone telling me guilt, shame & anxiety won't help me make better financial decisions, so this was pretty useful for me! I was familiar with most of the terms/concepts she goes over, but I did learn a few things & appreciated the accessible writing style. Tbh I skimmed some of the systemic analysis stuff because it wasn't new to me, but also how great is it to see a personal finance book acknowledge individual decisions can't change systemic inequality (but might make it more survivable)?
Rating: really liked it
Honestly, I skimmed a LOT of this book. Not because it was bad, but because a lot of it simply wasn’t for me. I’m not necessarily the target audience. Oh, I’m definitely bad with money, but this book is really better designed for someone much younger. The menoir bits I loved.
Rating: really liked it
I contributed this review to Really Into This
Check out all of our reviews at https://reallyintothis.com
Happy Reading, friends!
A book that breaks down the culture of money, finance, wealth & more. I need this book in my life!
PAIRS WELL WITH THE PODCAST
Since seeing this book on Instagram, I’ve listened to several episodes of Gaby’s podcast of the same name. Through the episodes, listeners get to know Gaby. We learn a bit about her financial history & it makes her more relatable. We also learn a bit about what drives her financial decisions. For instance, she donates money to charities she cares about. She also breaks down finances in a way that represents regular working people. I love it.
LET’S BE HONEST ABOUT MONEY
In the Bad With Money book, Gaby displays a vulnerability I truly respect. She outlines her family’s monetary history & how it influences her decisions even today. I also love she shares her experiences with mental health & how it impacts her finances. Throughout the book, Gaby encourages us all to talk about money. Through sharing our experiences, our mistakes & our triumphs with each other we can navigate the complicated financial world. Working together, this financial journey won’t be as isolating & scary. I love it because people can be so weird about money. It shouldn’t be this way & Gaby tries to bring so many financial discussions into the light.
SOME TAKEAWAYS
One thing I love about this book are the takeaways. At the end of each chapter, Gaby places a few bullet points. Each bullet details, you guessed it, the takeaways. These are great for all readers. This way it’s so easy to go back & refresh your mind as needed. Yes, I read the chapters about W-2s, 1099’s & other tax forms. Could I use a refresher? You bet your ass.
THE VERDICT
I am Really Into This book! Bad With Money is a resourceful book that breaks down finances in a hilarious, honest & meaningful way. Buy this book for every high school or college graduate you know. While you’re at it, buy yourself a copy!
Special thanks to Gaby Dunn & Atria Books for providing our copy in exchange for an honest & fair review.
Rating: really liked it
*Received a review copy from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review*
I'm so sad that I didn't LOVE this, because I do love Gaby Dunn (or at least I thought I did).
Firstly, do not read this if you are actually looking for financial advice. She covers topics so broadly that I found most of the tips to be so superficial that I can only imagine them being helpful if you have literally 0 knowledge of anything financial. Like 0. Maybe even negative knowledge. Even then I feel that there are better books out there to help you learn these things & that go more in depth while still being readable.
This was much more memoir/anecdote than I thought it would be as well, which might not have been a problem except for the fact that I just didn't like a lot of the anecdotes she shared. For example at one point she writes about a discussion she had with her mom about the student loans she was allowed to take so she could go to school out of state. It almost seemed like she was mad at her mom for letting her do that for her mental health? But in the next paragraph she writes about her old journal entries which state that she was seriously considering suicide if she had to stay in state. I don't know, it seems a little bit ridiculous to me that she would be mad at her parents for that when she was in such a state...
Finally there were a decent amount of "social justice-y" (for lack of a better term) thoughts shared. Even though she was technically preaching to the choir I still felt it was pretty heavy handed and not done as well as it could've been. I also think that a book where she's trying to encourage people to take control of their financial problems didn't benefit from constant reminding about how "the system wasn't made for you". While this might be true, unless you are ready to somehow overthrow the government right now you have to learn how to work within it and I would've appreciated a little more focus on that.
Overall this was just not as good as I wanted it to be and that was pretty disappointing to me.
Rating: really liked it
Some of it is very American focused and doesn’t work in the Canadian context.
Rating: really liked it
I think the best way to describe this book would be “enjoyable but completely useless.” Also, I think an owl totally could have caused the injuries that the woman in true crime documentary series “The Staircase” died from. Not that they ever mentioned that possibility in the documentary—not sure why Gaby threw that in this book. She’s like, “No way an owl did that!” But since they never suggested that as an option, anyone who watched that series would be like WTF. I didn’t even know that was a thing people said about that case, but I mentioned to my partner while we watched it, “It could have been a bird that did that.” Now I’ve googled it and it turns out I’m not the only one who thought that, so thanks Gaby Dunn. Also, you are delightful and I love you even though this book doesn’t do anything for me.
Rating: really liked it
Wow. So, Gaby is Bad with Money. This book is more memoir than how to so if you're looking for a straightforward how to get out of debt or how to handle money book, this isn't the best choice. There are financial tips throughout, but they are connected to lessons she's learned and not set up as a straight how to. If, on the other hand, you're looking for a funny, honest memoir about money troubles and learning how to not be bad with money, this is your book. Gaby writes with honesty and humor about her past monetary foibles and complete lack of financial knowledge and I know there are those who will greatly identify with her. My first roommate would simply stop writing down the checks she wrote in her checking account ledger when she was getting close to $0. Not stop spending... just stopped writing it down. Yeah, sure, that's how that works. I made plenty of my own mistakes with money over the years. At this point, in my mid-40s, I've learned to budget and my only debt is my mortgage which I've happily gotten paid down by nearly half over the past 5 years (I'm so looking forward to the day I make that last payment!). But it's been a journey rewriting the money scripts I learned growing up. Throughout the book, she tells not only her own story, but inserts what she's learned from interviewing experts and talking to friends and family along the way. Don't keep waiting, hoping for some windfall to save the day and fix all your money problems, get on a budget.
This book would be especially useful to a younger person - teens and 20s - as a warning what not to do and how to get a good start on handling money. I would also recommend checking out her podcast, also titled Bad with Money. I've started from the beginning and am really enjoying the interviews she does with experts and people in her life talking about money.
Thank you to Atria Books and NetGalley for the opportunity to read this book in exchange for my honest review.
Rating: really liked it
Bad with Money by Gaby Dunn is a 60-40 split between a memoir and financial advice book, which offered just enough self-help and just enough self-loathing for my tastes. One of my favorite things about this book is that she admittedly acknowledges that financial advice is sort of foolish in our current economy—throughout the book, whenever you may start to feel too down on your spending habits, Dunn is there to offer the helpful disclaimer that the ultimate problem is that you probably aren’t paid enough money for the ever-growing expenses of American life.
This leads to several chapters of financial advice that don’t require you to turn your conscience off before reading (before you say I am so clever, this phrase is stolen from my Episcopal uncle, who succinctly describes his denomination as “church where you don’t have to turn your brain off.”) Dunn doesn’t shy away from the “racial, classist, ableist, transphobic, homophobic, and misogynistic tints to money that can’t be ignored.” Instead of ignoring them, she sees them as all the MORE reason why we shouldn’t experience shame about our money issues, and should communicate these challenges honestly and openly, so that we can resolve as many as possible. She’s arguing for the middle ground in a way that’s inherently logical, by calling for systemic and individual accountability : “we can prepare for future medical debts while still calling our congressional representatives to put universal health care in place.”
In addition to the strong ethical grounding of Bad with Money, Dunn is also a hilarious commentator and master conversationalist, which makes sense given the frequent interviews on her podcast. She also speaks to a number of financial experts here, but their insights appear alongside #relatable, meme-like asides:
“It’s an unsolvable catch 22: how can I make sure I have what I need to exist and succeed within a broken system without supporting that system? To borrow from my own tweet: ‘me on Twitter: burn the capitalist system/Me on Amazon: check out my wish list’.”
Finally, I really enjoyed her accounts of how our early life experiences lead us to develop money scripts, which is right on time for me, given my own therapy visits and obsessive consumption of Esther Perel podcasts. This is another helpful way Dun encourages her readers to arrive at a more empathetic rationalization of their spending habits, and to ensure that we are learning more than a bunch of fad diets (I mean budgeting tricks.)
TLDR: Kudos to Gaby Dunn, and please read this if you are looking for common-sense financial self-help alongside an enjoyable memoir of an “LA creative.”
Rating: really liked it
I liked it! I do like Gaby Dunn's "Bad With Money" podcast, and this book seemed like an extended podcast episode with no guests. It is very 101, so someone with a good grasp of basic financial literacy likely will not learn anything. Other reviews mention being disappointed that the book was primarily anecdotes from Dunn's life and the lives of her friends, but I liked the anecdotes! I already love reading Refinery29's Money Diaries series and The Financial Diet's Financial Confessions, so I knew this book would entertain me. I admittedly don't know much about Gaby Dunn, I just listen to her podcast and see her pop up every once in a while on YouTube or TV. It's been fun listening to her learn about money, and frankly, it's also reassuring to know that I'm not totally alone in my confusion about what I assumed were basic financial concepts.
Rating: really liked it
Some interesting stats and definitely gives you something to think about. But it just wasn't what I was expecting.
Rating: really liked it
this book is definitely not meant for me. even though i’m relatively young, it’s seems to be geared towards someone even younger than i am. and also someone in debt. i am not in debt, so much of the stuff about debt didn’t apply to me.
this book is also definitely at least half memoir. while gaby does give some good advice, this book is more entertaining than it is informative.
props for it being easy to read, and for being the first ever finance-related book i’ve ever read. definitely didn’t hate it as much as i thought i would.
3 stars.
