Fortune in Your Cookies
 Meena S. Cheng
 (Guest reviewer - Kathy Chwedyk)
 2002 Published by Choix
  ISBN: 0971661332
Amazon's price is: $16.95

Finding Financial Wisdom in Everyday Eating. Money, in its commodity form, provides us with basic food & shelter; yet in its purest form, offers us life's most precious gift -- the freedom to choose.

Food with its abundance, is a blessing that not only sustains our existence, but also encourages creativity & brings people of all cultures together. The array of offerings that money & food can provide is only limited by one's inspiration & desire.

From Cherries Jubilee to Apple Pie, Fortune in Your Cookies will take you on a journey to discover some of the most profound financial wisdom ensconced in everyday eating, & put you on a path to becoming financially independent.

Guest Reviewer Kathy Chwedyk writes:

Fortune in Your Cookies, in the best-selling tradition of Who Moved My Cheese? & The One Minute Manager, is one of those unassuming little books that can change the way you look at certain subjects forever.

In a mere 229 pages, Meena S. Cheng, a Certified Financial Planner who apparently learned more than how to balance six platters at once during those college years she worked in a restaurant, uses food metaphors to demystify the issue of financial planning &, through a series of parables, illustrates such complex concepts as compound interest, estate planning & balancing one's portfolio to ensure a comfortable old age -- concepts my MBA husband has tried in vain to explain to me -- in such a way that even a high-strung creative type with math anxiety like myself can understand them.

The bonus is nine recipes that illustrate each concept.

For example, in the chapter on compound interest, Cheng uses a lively, fictionalized story in which her alter ago, Skye, explains to her cousin, Ronnie, how ordinary people can amass enormous wealth by simply letting their money grow. She compares the concept to her cousin's beef stew, say: “The way time can transform the most humble piece of meat into sheer rhapsody is the same way it can transform humble pennies into glorious dollars.” & at the end of the chapter, she includes the recipe. I found myself reading this chapter out loud to my husband, the financial wizard, who was extremely impressed with it.

He was even more impressed with the stew, which I made for him one evening with a loaf of crusty homemade bread. Sublime on a mid-winter evening! In the next few days as I tried other recipes in Meena Cheng's book, he'd tease, “and what financial concept are we learning tonight?”

Another example: In the chapter called "The Waste of Crawfish", Meena Cheng, as Skye, explains to her Louisiana-native friend Jacqueline how eating crawfish is like one's paycheck -- to get at the succulent meat, you've got to pinch off the head, which is almost as long as the body, & suck the meat out of the tail. So, out of five pounds of crawfish, there's very little left that you can actually eat once you get rid of those shells. From there, Skye goes on to tell her friend how she could keep more of her paycheck if she invested some of it in a 401(k), & she gives the breakdown of how much she would save in taxes. Then Meena Cheng follows this up with an absolutely killer gumbo recipe.

Fortune in Your Cookies is profound in its simplicity...& is a practical gift for that person you know who is recently divorced & trying to rear children on one income, struggling under a mountain of credit card debt, or trying a bit late in the game to save money for retirement. Who among us doesn't know someone who is facing these challenges? The book is ostensibly geared toward women, but the concepts of universal.

The very best thing about Fortune in Your Cookies, in my opinion, is its message of hope. It's a feel-good affirmation that no financial situation is so bleak you can't rectify it with determination & common sense.

The only thing Fortune in Your Cookies lacks, oddly, is a cookie recipe.

Meena S. Cheng is a Certified Financial Planner with 20+ years of experience in the financial industry. she has practiced public & private accounting as a CPA & is currently an Assistant Vice President of Investments for U.S. Bancorp Piper Jaffray.

Ms. Cheng is an experienced public speaker who has spoken to Fortune 500 companies, universities, conventions & professional conferences. She is also a culinary aficionado who has owned two restaurants & has been a long time advocate on children's literacy. She founded the popular "Cooks for Books" fundraising program for Pageahead. She lives in Kirkland, Washington.
(08/18/02)

Guest Reviewer - Kathy Chwedyk
2002©Kathy Chwedyk