Health & Wealth

Note: I put both financial and health reviews together here – because I have found that the two topics go hand-in-hand.

Laugh-out-loud funny, irreverent, thought-provoking Chris Crawley (and Henry Lodge, MD, and Jennifer Sachek, PhD) will have you snickering your way to a healthier, happier & more youthful you – no matter what your age or stage of life is. Chris, Harry and Jen have my sweetheart and me rethinking the next stage of our life. And with Chris driving the discussion, it’s a hilarious and encouraging experience. The topic is deep – what do we think our last third of our lives will like and exactly how do we want to be living it? Chris definitely got us thinking and even more important, through his boisterous good humor and wily coaching, actually, happily, DOING the things he recommends.

Chris test-drives all of his advice – and his stories will get you chuckling even as you start wondering how to incorporate what he suggests into your schedule.  Younger Next Year is his book with Harry Lodge that talks about just how are we going to spend our time, mentally and physically, during the last third of our lives. He has quite a few ideas of what we can be doing NOW so we can keep doing it THEN. Dr. Harry Lodge provides the compelling science to go along with Chris’s adventures.

 Thinner Next Year is Chris writing (and test driving) with Dr. Jennifer Sachek. In similar format, Jen provides the science and details, Chris provides the real-life experiences and personal stories of how to achieve what the title suggests.

 

The Old Money Book by Byron Tully. Humorous, tongue-in-cheek but VERY spot-on advice for thinking about money and our relationship with it. I had the mental image of a visiting great-uncle (looking eerily like an older Winston Churchill) sitting back in a wing-back leather chair in an old English country estate library. In between puffs on his cigar, he acerbically mutters little gems of great financial management advice to the “younger niece or nephew” (us, the reader.) One of the best pieces of advice is that there is quite a difference between “appearance of wealth” and “reality of wealth”. We’ve all heard the idea expressed before – but it is still one of the most valuable concepts out there to keep in mind when we consider our spending. It’s good to hear it again (and in such a humorous and descriptive way.) But that is only one of the many terrific concepts in the book. There are many more to help the reader understand one’s relationship with money and how to handle both the relationship and the money itself wisely. This is a book to keep around and reread every so often – for both the humor and the good advice.