Soldier of Finance

A few months ago, I talked about From Combat Leader to Corporate Leader, which did an excellent job taking military terminology and concepts and applying them to the business world. In Soldier of Fortune, former Army National Guardsman and Iraq veteran turned financial planner Jeff Rose uses the same concept to explain financial terms. From comparing fixing your credit to doing the low crawl to equating goal setting to land nav, Rose uses military terminology to cover everything from how to find your real credit score (Did you know that one of the big three agencies gives you a different kind of score than the rest? Neither did I.) to how to save a little money on your homeowners’ insurance.

Throughout the book, Rose uses a friendly, informal and encouraging tone. He is open about his own past financial mistakes as well as hard choices he’s had to make, such as refusing to cosign on a loan for one of his parents. He starts each chapter with a little military anecdote to set the tone and then explains how that scenario is similar to the financial topic in that chapter. Each chapter also contains a “go/no go” checklist to encourage you to ask yourself key questions and a summary to help you recap everything you learned. Several chapters also have outside resources listed, such as websites where you can research financial planners, and the back of the book has a list of useful resources.

The chapters are aligned by order of necessity. For example, paying down your debt is covered before how to purchase life insurance, since debt is the number one enemy to financial success. While the chapters build on each other, they can, for the most part, be read independently of each other. There will be occasional references to other chapters, but, if you’re debt free and really just want to focus on improving your credit score or determining whether you should buy into your company’s 401(k) or brave the stock market instead, you can skip over the debt chapters without feeling lost.

That said, I still recommend reading the whole thing. I’m not a financial guru, but my husband and I are pretty squared away when it comes to debt, credit scores, and retirement accounts and I still found things in almost every chapter that I found useful. In fact, I only have one minor complaint about the book and that is that a few times, he violates the military lesson of “never put anything on a slide you aren’t prepared to talk to.” For example, he says that, for a certain kind of investor, he would recommend “just two funds, a large stock company and an international stock fund” – then neither explains those type of funds nor explains why he would choose those two for that kind of investor. But, as I said, that’s minor.

The only other thing I’ll point out before I wrap this up is that he points readers to www.soldieroffinance.com/resources several times during the book, but that doesn’t exist anymore. Instead, go to his main financial website – www.goodfinancialcents.com – to get more details. And, if you “enlist now” (subscribe, that is), you can get two chapters of Soldier of Finance for free and his “Money Dominating Toolkit,” which has a life insurance checklist, budgeting guide, and several other useful financial planning tools, also for free.

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