Smart Women Finish Rich : 7 Steps to Achieving Financial Security and Funding Your Dreams

by David Bach

Paperback - 242 pages (November 9, 1999)

Broadway Books

It is commonly the case that, for cultural reasons, women embarking on financial endeavors feel they are out of their element and start to question their competence. In this book, David Bach — senior vice president of investment at Morgan Stanley Dean Witter and speaker at investment seminars for woman — aims to correct this. The difficulty, he says, is that women don’t use what they prize most highly, freedom and security, as investment guides. He provides seven steps that he says will help any woman — from the housewife to the CEO of a multinational corporation — organize her financial planning for maximum efficiency and get as much out of it as she can.

Most of the advice he gives is solid and could easily be used by men as well, as the author takes pains to discuss "masculine" as well as "feminine" values — men, he says, are more driven by desire for material possessions — and the book might be worth a read by both sexes.



Mary Kay You Can Have It All: Lifetime Wisdom from America's Foremost Woman Entrepreneur

by Mary Kay Ash

Hardcover - 258 pages (September 1995)

Prima Publishing

Mary Kay is a real woman’s business success story. Leaving her old career, she invested her life savings and, against all odds, managed to create an internationally known and hugely profitable cosmetics company. Though working in an area completely different from her previous career — she had worked for 25 years in direct marketing sales — she managed by dint of perseverance, ingenuity and just plain savvy business management to create what can only be described as an extraordinarily successful commercial empire. What is even more remarkable is that she managed to accomplish this without putting either of her other commitments (to her family and to her religion) on the back burner. Anyone with similar dreams and a wish to achieve financial success without sacrificing the other good things in life will well profit from reading this book.