Jeff D. Opdyke – författare

At some point in every relationship couples run up against financial quandaries that neither imagined while dating. Some will be relatively small, such as worrying over a mate's bad credit history; some will be huge; such as a spouse taking financial control in a marriage of supposed equals. Too often with money, couples face two choices: fight and risk making the situation worse, or keep quiet and risk making the situation worse. "Financially Ever After" offers a third option: family financial fluency - the insight, knowledge and vocabulary couples need to communicate effectively about their money and their feelings about it. Opdyke offers up dozens of real-life scenarios between couples, with actual scripts and suggestions of how to broach touchy subjects with your significant other.

When couples are planning their financial lives together, few questions are as significant as how to afford a family. The average middle-income family will spend somewhere between $185k and $270k raising a child through the first seventeen years of life, according to the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture. And now, in this difficult financial climate, tension levels are running even higher over how to cover these costs. To help couples meet this challenge, veteran Wall Street Journal personal finance writer Jeff Opdyke has laid out everything they need to do. From preparing financially for a baby's arrival to the financial lessons kids need to learn so that they have a solid grasp on money by they time they leave home, the chapters are split into natural divisions that track money's major categories: earning, saving, spending, investing, and giving. Finally, there's a section on the all-important basics of what parents should know to save for and ultimately afford college costs.Opdyke, who for six years was the "Love & Money" columnist for the Journal, provides a smart, accessible blueprint for parents that will help reduce the stress of building a family and enhance parents' skills for raising money-savvy kids. With Opdyke's advice in hand, parents will be well-equipped to create a sound financial life for their family.

From the day we receive our first piggybank to the day we can financially make it on our own, our parents play a fundamental role in our financial lives. One of the most poignant stages in life comes when you must assume the role of the parent to your parents. It can be a frenetic stage, in which you struggle to understand the finances specific to aging parents-often in the face of an emergency. "Protecting Your Parents' Money" is the essential guide to helping you navigate this confusing and difficult transition, and provide a game plan for tackling complex like estate planning, Medicare planning, and nursing homes. Most importantly, it will help bridge the communication barrier between parents and adult children that can make the process so much more difficult than it needs to be. Among the topics covered include Personal Finance 101: The Senior Years: The essential definitions and workings of the myriad investment options and financial requirements your parents will deal with in retirement. The Talk: The one, all-encompassing discussion every child needs to have with every parent at some point. The Move: The hunt for a quality home. How do you research nursing homes?What should you be looking for? And how do you compare costs and how are your parents assets factored into the mix? Understanding Medicare. Elder Fraud: How to look for tell-tale signs that your parents have been victimized. At a time when the nation prepares for the pending retirement of the massive Baby Boomer generation, this book will provide the comprehensive map you will need to navigate the breadth of financial issues, while treating seniors with dignity and compassion they deserve.

Your Guide to Managing the Real Dollars—and the Real Emotions—of Your RelationshipToo often with money, couples face two choices: fight and risk making the situation worse, or keep quiet and risk making the situation worse. Financially Ever After offers a third option: family financial fluency—the insight, knowledge, and vocabulary every couple needs to communicate effectively about money.Jeff D. Opdyke, previously The Wall Street Journal''s syndicated "Love & Money" columnist, covers any and all financial issues that couples face, including budgeting, deciding on whether to have joint or individual accounts, dividing up family financial chores, confronting debt, making major purchases, as well as handling mortgages, employment, children, and even engagement rings. He offers dozens of real-life scenarios between couples, with scripts and suggestions for how to broach delicate money-related subjects with your significant other, whether he or she has a shaky credit history or is feeling left out of family financial decision-making.The book also provides helpful tools to organize your financial life, such as a budgeting chart, a "scorecard" to track spending, and an "affordability calculator" to help you figure out how much buying a house will cost you.A must-read for any couple starting out, Financially Ever After lays the groundwork for building a healthy and thriving financial life together.

Wall Street Journal "Love and Money" columnist Jeff D. Opdyke offers a compassionate and highly effective handbook designed to help elderly parents manage their money. Protecting Your Parents'' Money is the essential guide to helping Mom and Dad navigate the finances of retirement, covering such topics as understanding Medicare, preventing elder fraud, and the hunt for a quality, affordable retirement home. Protecting Your Parents'' Money is a book everyone should own, as members of the Baby Boomer generation find themselves dealing with the many financial problems surrounding aging parents, and face their own future as seniors.

How Jeff D. Opdyke became a successful international investor is an Everyman tale that began thirteen years ago when he discarded conventional wisdom. At the time, Wall Street’s pros insisted that average investors buy domestic mutual funds that invest overseas. But Jeff ignored their tepid advice. Instead, he opted for the intrepid, opening bank and brokerage accounts from New Zealand to Hong Kong in order to buy the local stocks he wanted to own, not those that some fund manager deemed worthy.Jeff did so with great insight: People are people no matter whether home is in Madrid, Memphis, or Mumbai. They drink beer and buy homes and the furnishings and appliances to put in them. As hundreds of millions of people around the world strive to move into the middle class, the companies that meet these basic needs are becoming the great investment opportunities of today and tomorrow. Only a fraction of them, however, trade on American stock exchanges. So, armed with simple tools available to you and me (the Internet and an e-mail account), Jeff found companies intimately tied to their local economies but capable of expansion—to America, perhaps, or more important to Asia and other regions of explosive growth. One such company is Fisher & Paykel, a New Zealand–based maker of appliances that over the course of a dozen years has produced a steady stream of dividends and special distributions and has gained more than 17 percent a year for Jeff.How to find companies like Fisher & Paykel is the heart of this book. You can indeed make the world your oyster by diversifying your portfolio, and Jeff provides indispensable insight and practical guidelines for every aspect of investing directly overseas. He shows how to research and track companies, set up foreign brokerage accounts, handle tax issues, convert currencies, and fund accounts.Why venture beyond the United States to begin with? Because America is really just one small island. For every American public company, there are four beyond our shores—many of which are small to midsize and have huge potential for growth, which you’ll never find by trading in America alone.If you’re ready to take the next step in building a truly diversified portfolio, you will gain a wealth of invaluable insight and information from Jeff’s engaging first-person accounts of his trial-and-error—but, ultimately, highly successful—globe-trotting career in search of worthy stocks. The opportunities for investing overseas are indisputable. The World Is Your Oyster is your travel guide: pinpointing five of the best reasons to go global, detailing various ways for investors of every temperament—from timid to adventurous—to cross financial borders, focusing on how to invest directly in hot spots from China to Turkey to Eastern Europe, and revealing how the Internet and other twenty-first-century technology has opened a world of direct overseas investment opportunities for you.From the Hardcover edition.

From America’s most authoritative source: the quintessential primer on understanding and managing your moneyMoney courses through just about every corner of our lives and has an impact on the way we live today and how we’ll be able to live in the future. Understanding your money, and getting it to work for you, has never been more important than it is today, as more and more of us are called upon to manage every aspect of our financial lives, from managing day-to-day living expenses to planning a college savings fund and, ultimately, retirement. From The Wall Street Journal, the most trusted name in financial and money matters, this indispensable book takes the mystery out of personal finance. Start with the basics, learn how they work, and you’ll become a better steward of your own money, today and in the future. Consider The Wall Street Journal Complete Personal Finance Guidebook your cheat sheet to the finances of your life. This book will help you:• Understand the nuts and bolts of managing your money: banking, investing, borrowing, insurance, credit cards, taxes, and more• Establish realistic budgets and savings plans• Develop an investment strategy that makes sense for you• Make the right financial decisions about real estate• Plan for retirement intelligentlyAlso available—the companion to this guidebook: The Wall Street Journal Personal Finance Workbook, by Jeff D. OpdykeGet your financial life in order with help from The Wall Street Journal. Look for:• The Wall Street Journal Complete Money and Investing Guidebook • The Wall Street Journal Complete Identity Theft Guidebook• The Wall Street Journal Complete Real Estate Investing Guidebook From the Trade Paperback edition.