About the Book

Excerpt

About the Author

Letter from Author

Purchase

About the Book

Ten years ago, Alice Wood was living a normal life, balancing her career, family, and finances with confidence. Having grown up with a father who was a bank president from the pre–branch banking era and a mother who was influenced by the Great Depression, Alice learned prudence and financial responsibility at home. She knew instinctively how to handle money, until a brain injury changed her life.

After the injury, one of the many new chal­lenges Alice faced was an inability to manage her money and for the first time in her life she found herself overwhelmed by debt. Inspired by Weight Watchers’® daily discipline of journaling and the principle of group accountability, she created a new and radically simple program to help herself reclaim financial stability. She called it Wealth Watchers. This simple program enabled her to meet her own financial goals and soon was helping thousands of others to do the same. Today, the Wealth Watchers program is an important part of the rapidly growing movement for financial literacy and empower­ment sponsored by school, state, and federal government programs; corporations such as Visa; and several large financial institutions.

In the book, Wealth Watchers, Alice shares her story of overcoming the financial setbacks that almost derailed her and presents the principles behind her simple and powerfully effective pro­gram in full for the first time. The book gives you all the tools you need to understand and organize your finances — clearly explaining how to determine your disposable income, create a budget that works for you, determine and reach your savings goals, and most importantly identify and change which of your spending patterns are knocking you off-track.

At the heart of the Wealth Watcher’s program is one simple calculation: your Daily Disposable Income (DDI), the money you can spend each day without going into debt. Amazingly, most people don’t know their DDI. In this book Alice explains how to figure out your DDI and then how to use it to help change your spending and saving habits. Once you have your DDI you can discover the Power of 365 calculation, which is when you multiply out the consequence of making the same purchasing decision every day of the year.  You might think that a $3 daily coffee is no big deal but it becomes one when you realize that a year of that coffee will cost you $1,095. 

The Wealth Watchers program helps you make pur­chasing decisions, big and small, one day at a time that will help you build positive habits to last your lifetime. Using the powerful tools in this book,you will learn how to analyze your expenses, stay out of debt, start saving again, and—regardless of your age or income level—thrive!