Fight Back: 81 Ways to Help You Save Money and Protect Yourself from Corporate Trickery

by Ellen Roseman

Money-saving advice from Canada's leading consumer advocate In this book Ellen Roseman distills the financial advice she gives in her columns and blogs into 81 quick tips that all Canadians can use to help them spend sensibly, save money, and avoid costly consumer traps. This book of "personal finance greatest hits" is filled with illustrative examples and cautionary advice from Roseman and stories from her faithful readers. Filled with a wealth of information, the book includes the low-down on dealing with banks and car dealers, cutting costs of communication services, improving your credit, buying and renovating a home, fighting online fraud, ensuring you have the right insurance, and more. Don't spend another dollar until you read Ellen Roseman's best-ever tips for saving money and making wise financial decisions.

Genres: Finance

304 pages, Paperback

First published December 17, 2012

Reviews

[Barbara · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was surprisingly disappointed by "Fight Back."

As a long-time fan of Ellen Roseman's work in the Toronto Star, I was counting on her ability to keep financial education palatable thanks to her strong storytelling prowess. The book is instead a mishmash of dull articles on financial tips from a variety of experts.

Perhaps the most frustrating element of the book is the flood of experts who provide similar advice in back-to-back articles. For example, three different writers provide tips on how to save money on telecom bills. Is that really necessary when the advice is all the same?

By their very nature, consumer rights and financial literacy are boring topics to the average reader. Roseman has been successful as a consumer rights writer because she has focused on the individual stories of Canadians fighting large corporations.

I wish she had brought her powerful storytelling ability to her latest book.

[Promod Sharma · Rating 4 out of 5]

Consumer advocate and journalist Ellen Roseman helps readers fight back. Now she's giving us the tools to help ourselves. The book has numerous real life examples of corporations behaving badly to customers. That's disturbing since we deserve better. At least there are simple ways to get results if we're organized, polite and persistent.

I would have preferred if Ellen wrote the whole book herself but also see the value in getting help from niche specialists.

If you read Ellen's column in the Toronto Star or her blog, you'll probably like this practical book.

You'll find my further thoughts in my blog post: fight back against corporate trickeryu.

[Anandh Sundar · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book is aimed at the Canadian market and hence many suggestions are not appropriate elsewhere outside the Western World. But the basic tenets apply such as documentation, assertiveness, alertness and judicious use of social media, escalations and small claims court/consumer forums

[Quan Bao Truong · Rating 2 out of 5]

most of advices in this book is not new to me or they are too time consuming to try

[TheEditingCompany · Rating 5 out of 5]

Proofread by The EditingCo. Team.

[Sabine · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some nice ideas. Most are not new, but it is good to have them all in one
book.