They were five dynamic young women: smart, successful-and secretly drowning in debt. Inspired by an episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show on personal finance, Andrea, Angela, Katie, Robyn, and Sandra formed a money club, together developing strategies for turning their finances around. Just one year later, they had dramatically improved their financial situations-and had made major developments in their careers, relationships, and life goals to boot. Their proven recipe for success has since been featured on The Oprah Winfrey Show and MSNBC, and in the New York Daily News.
How did they do it? These five women-with varied careers in marketing, public relations, social work, and TV production-joined forces to create a fun, simple, effective strategy for achieving financial success, forming a money club, and supporting each other every step of the way. Now, in this extraordinary hands-on guide, the women, who dubbed themselves the Smart Cookies, share the secrets of their success.
Weaving anecdotes from their own lives with practical how-to advice, the Smart Cookies offer strategies that cut across the financial spectrum, whether you’re deeply in debt or just want to manage your money better. Tackling the unique financial challenges facing women today, they offer easy-to-follow advice on everything from creating a spending plan to boosting your income to starting your own money club.

A new kind of manifesto for the working woman, with tips on building wealth and finding balance, as well as inspiration for harnessing the freedom and power that comes from a breadwinning mindset.

Nearly half of working women in the United States are now their household’s main breadwinner. And yet, the majority of women still aren’t being brought up to think like breadwinners. In fact, they’re actually discouraged–by institutional bias and subconscious beliefs–from building their own wealth, pursuing their full earning potential, and providing for themselves and others financially. The result is that women earn less, owe more, and have significantly less money saved and invested for the future than men do. And if women do end up the main breadwinners, they’ve been conditioned to feel reluctant and unprepared to manage the role.

In Think Like a Breadwinner, financial expert Jennifer Barrett reframes what it really means to be a breadwinner. By dismantling the narrative that women don’t–and shouldn’t–take full financial responsibility to create the lives they want, she reveals not only the importance of women building their own wealth, but also the freedom and power that comes with it. With concrete practical tools, as well as examples from her own journey, Barrett encourages women to reclaim, rejoice in, and aspire to the role of breadwinner like never before.