Balancing Act: A Canadian Woman's Financial Success Guide Reved

Martha Wilson is Canadian correspondent for the Japan Times (Tokyo) and
a Toronto-based freelance editor and writer.

Joanne Thomas Yaccato has become something of a financial-planning icon
for Canadian women, who know her as the personal-finance columnist for
Chatelaine and CBC radio.

Written in a jokey personal-history style, this book outlines
Yaccato’s own battle with debt and bad planning. (“‘Fat and
broke,’ I thought miserably. The urge to go back to bed with a
lifetime supply of M&Ms was overwhelming. I felt as though I had hit
rock bottom.”) Over the book’s 11 chapters, she is gradually
transformed into an educated, financially stable woman. “Learn along
with me” seems to be her motto.

Balancing Act was carefully planned to be accessible and
unintimidating, though the chatty, self-deprecating tone (“Thankfully
I’m not as stupid as I look”) and cartoony illustrations can get
annoying. The style is closer to The Wealthy Barber than to Winning on
Wall Street. Still, the book is not unsophisticated, and Yaccato never
talks down to the reader. She steers us adroitly through insurance,
wills, investment funds, retirement choices, types of mortgages, finding
a financial adviser, and the other basics of personal finance. She is
also an activist in the fight against gender-based pricing, and reminds
us rousingly that women must protest the higher-priced haircuts, dry
cleaning, and tailoring we get hit with.

One of the most helpful of the author’s charts and tables, slotted
neatly into Chapter 1, is the Priority Pyramid. This commonsense
notion—attend to the big stuff first—is logically laid out and easy
to follow. Yaccato expands on it throughout the book, clarifying why
term deposits and residential real estate should come before stocks,
bonds, and tax shelters, but after RRSPs and disability insurance.
(Commodities, gems, and art occupy the tip of the pyramid.) Practical,
specific guidance like this forms the core of the book. At the end is a
helpful 12-page resource directory.

Balancing Act is a valuable book for helping Canadian women of all ages
get their financial houses in order.