cover image When Are You Entitled to New Underwear and Other Major Financial Decisions: Making Your Money Dreams Come True

When Are You Entitled to New Underwear and Other Major Financial Decisions: Making Your Money Dreams Come True

Eileen Michaels. Scribner Book Company, $24 (269pp) ISBN 978-0-684-81534-3

This book is for women who, like the author's grandmother, have skinflint second husbands who ration their wives' fruit snacks to half an apple a day. But such timid women might be put off by Michaels's aggressiveness, which would be unfortunate, for, as she shows in this memoir cum financial and self-help guide, she's savvy and simpatico. A financial adviser in New York City, she came to her money career via a nursing stint and a ""financially incompatible marriage,"" recalled here, that left her the sole support of two sons. Enter her ""commitment to winning,"" a mantra she repeats endlessly in her pep talk to women to change their relationship to money from passive to active by understanding interest rates, credit charges, various types of insurance and investments. Michaels reminisces about her Jewish immigrant grandparents and parents, her Brooklyn childhood and friends she met on the way to Wall Street. And she proves to be such a confiding person she even tells readers how she plans to have her ashes allocated when she dies. (Jan.)