Your Money

A Beginner’s Guide To Building Wealth

Posted: 10/15/2010

The “Building Wealth” workbook has tips and strategies to help your money grow.

(NAPSI) - There’s good news for those who want to build wealth but don’t know how to go about it.

“Building Wealth: A Beginner’s Guide To Securing Your Financial Future” presents an overview of personal wealth-building strategies that includes setting financial goals, budgeting, saving and investing, managing debt, understanding credit reports and scores and protecting your wealth. It’s published by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas in print and on an interactive CD-ROM.

What sets “Building Wealth” apart from other financial guides is the workbook design. For example, in the section on the importance of tracking day-to-day spending as a step toward developing a realistic budget, the book provides the reader with an expense sheet for actually tracking expenses.

Ideas, such as budgeting and saving, are turned into actual behaviors, a dimension that does not exist in many guides to building wealth.

“Building Wealth” also discusses basic investing principles and products and strategies for investing for retirement and other long-term goals.

Other tips for building wealth addressed in the book include:

• Stick to a budget

• Build up a reserve fund to handle unforseen events

• Pay off credit card balances monthly

• Save for big purchases so you can pay in cash and avoid debt

• Always read the fine print on a loan application.

It finishes with a section on controlling debt, a glossary and a handy list of resources on financial literacy, budget management and investing, as well as ways to contact various regulatory and consumer protection agencies.

In addition to print and CD-ROM, a version of the guide is also available in Spanish. To learn more or to order a copy of the guide or CD-ROM, visit the website at www.dallasfed.org or call (800) 333-4460 ext. 5254.