The Naked Millionaire: A Women's Guide to Building a Healthy Relationship with Money

Louise Karch is a career consultant with Carswell Partners in London, Ontario.

Maxine Hyndman went bankrupt and learned so much from the experience
that she wrote The Naked Millionaire. As a divorced single mom, she
understands financial distress and coined a new
term—“whealth”—to represent her vision of healthy wealth. Her
aim is to heighten readers’ level of “whealth consciousness” by
providing a New Age spin on fiscal matters. She believes that women’s
flawed beliefs lead to a bankruptcy of the self (lack of self-love),
which bankrupts their environment (for example, overspending on material
goods) and results in financial bankruptcy. Her solution is to ask
readers to rewire their beliefs (such as “retire your belief in
struggle”), write down the “lessons of one’s poverty
consciousness,” define your worth, clean up your credit rating, state
your values, track receipts to see if your spending is aligned with your
values, use affirmations, write a “want list,” define your greater
purpose, set goals, write out an ethical will, and take “Vitamin A”
(action steps) daily.

For those (regardless of gender) hungering for a spiritual perspective
on money management, Hyndman’s book fits the bill. In fact, there
isn’t much that is specifically female; there is no comment on
women’s reluctance to negotiate salary or what to do about it. Those
who see money as a necessary evil are unlikely to use Hyndman’s advice
to “see a penny count a blessing.” What’s missing from the book
are tales of whether her techniques have made a difference in other
people’s lives. Also, the exercises that she requests are arduous and
not clearly set out from the text. She does direct her readers to her
website, where she says her tools are summarized, but I found no clear
link to the exercises she mentions. The writing is at times immature;
for example, the section on goal setting uses the metaphor of baseball.

Hyndman is genuine in her quest, but her approach will not appeal to
all.