Happy Ever After

Financial literacy is too often taught as a dry subject, focusing on its own rhetoric and outcomes, not the desires of readers to learn. Happy Ever After: Financial Freedom Isn't a Fairy Tale, from its title to each sub-section of each chapter, focuses on the benefits to the reader, how the information takes them towards financial security and away from worries. Seven chapters teach the vital steps of this journey, with the acronym MISSION, and come with their own fairytale allegory and woodblock style illustration as well as how the reader can use them to get "out of the woods." The acronym MISSION stands for Money, Income, Saving, Spending, Investing, Owning, Now. Each chapter is a crucial step in the journey of understanding the importance of money, how to get it, how saving leads to investing and compounded gains - and that this can lead to independence. It explains how to move from no understanding of money at all, to achieving the Freedom Formula of 25x your annual spending, building on lessons taught to migrant workers and the author's own daughter, including "The Seven Dollar Millionaire" and how compound investing can be the source of most of the money we save. The world is ageing with very few governments planning properly for retirees to live well. Young people will need to take their finances into their own hands more and more, and yet no one is equipping them to do this. The covid-19 crisis, when it ends, will also show the importance of having an emergency fund and financial security.