Introduction to Adulting

After writing the book, 5 Buckets, 4 Shovels, a Beach and a Map, and giving it to clients and friends, I found something interesting happened—they shared it with their kids. That book uses pictures and easy-to-understand concepts to explain financial planning. Five buckets represent asset categories for allocating personal wealth, and four shovels represent the four typical financial advisors needed to make wise spending and saving decisions. I had been using analogies like buckets and shovels for more than 40 years with my own clients to help them develop their financial plans. So when we published the book, it was both fascinating and exciting to discover its value to a younger audience.

With that in mind, I began thinking about all of the basic personal finance topics that young adults should know as they enter adulthood—topics that aren’t being taught in school. These are concepts that my parents taught me as a teenager but that a lot of kids don’t know about today. For example, how do you open a bank account? When I was five-years-old, my dad drove me down to the local Police Credit Union, walked me through the process of opening my first bank account, and explained how it would help me. Today, instead of driving down to the local bank, you can use a mobile device to research whatever you need to know about opening an account—and then apply online. At the end of the day, regardless of how you do it, you’ll still end up with a bank account.

In this book, we try to focus on the concepts, why it’s important to know this stuff, and how to make it work for you. We understand that there are a variety of ways to put the concepts into practice, whether you speak to a human being or do everything on your mobile device; but the important part is understanding the back story—the reason why financial planning is so important.

Each chapter is broken down into five components: Why Do I Need To Know This?, How Do I Get Started?, Quick Tips, Personal Finance Stories, and Exercises. The idea is to give you a few ways to digest the information, provide some quick tips to get you started, describe a real-life scenario putting the topic into action, and give you a practice exercise using your own information to be sure you understand the concept in each chapter.

I hope this book will be useful and that someday you’ll be able to sit down with your children and explain these concepts to them, regardless of the tools they are using—like a chip embedded in their brains instead of the minicomputer you once carried in your pocket.

On a personal note, I want to thank all those involved with the creation of this second book. The marketing team at my firm, SD Mayer & Associates, helped write and produce this book, including Greg Barber, Yasi Agah, and a team of marketing interns. Thank you to Amy Sparkman for editing our book and for her invaluable input. I also got plenty of feedback and support from my kids, who are young adults themselves—Dylan, Kenzie and Nicola, and from my wife, Patty Mayer. Finally, Rich Sigberman drew all of the illustrations, which helped bring the concepts to life.

This book has been donated through the tremendous support of our friends and corporate sponsors, whose fi nancial contributions to our 5 Buckets, 4 Shovels Foundation made this all possible. The mission of the foundation is to use the proceeds from the sale of our other books, “5 Buckets, 4 Shovels, a Beach and a Map” and “The Toughest Guy I Ever Knew and Other Short Stories,” to be used to support fi nancial literacy for young adults in high school and college. The proceeds are used to purchase these books, and the goal is to reach one million young adults within fi ve years.

All of my books are available for purchase on amazon.com or through our local San Francisco Bay Area chain of bookstores, Books, Inc. or through our website, 5buckets4shovels.com.

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