How to Pay Less and Keep more for Yourself: The Essential Consumer Guide to Canadian Banking and Investing.

Janet Arnett is the former campus manager of adult education at Ontario’s Georgian College. She is the author of Antiques and Collectibles: Starting Small, The Grange at Knock, and 673 Ways to Save Money.

How do you like to conduct your financial business? Are you an online warrior, a traditionalist, or a half-and-halfer? Carrick acknowledges that any advice, to be useful, needs to speak to the reader’s preference. His solution? A quiz to help readers identify their own style. Action plans for all three profiles are incorporated throughout the book.

The text falls into two neat sections: everyday financial management and investing. The personal financial section starts with basic advice on, for example, how to reduce fees on chequing accounts and earn more interest on savings. The section includes using debit and credit cards, reward-points credit cards, ATM fees, traditional loans, home-equity lines of credit, and credit ratings. Carrick discusses mortgage features and offers tips for negotiating the best deal. Throughout this section of the book the underlying assumption is that a buck or two does matter and that small fees add up to significant expenses. The options for traditionalists and half-and-halfers are considered, yet Carrick clearly feels that online warriors have an edge. Lists of online resources, with specific urls, strengthen this stance.

The second half of the work is devoted to investing. It is sufficiently involved to mystify the paycheque-to-paycheque reader yet gratify the more advanced money manipulator who would have found the first section of the book too basic.

This section covers mutual funds, index funds, RRSPs, RESPs, fees attached to investments of various types, choosing a personal investment adviser, discount brokers, wraps, principal-protected notes, and the portfolio mix, including a blue-chip stock portfolio. Carrick makes an effort to give basic explanations and to keep jargon to a minimum. Occasionally he slips off this target, assuming a higher level of reader knowledge than is likely to be the case, yet at least the first part of the work is approachable by novices to the financial world.