• Janesville - winner of the FT-McKinsey Book of they Year award, Janesville chronicles the lives of several families in this Wisconsin town for five years after the main employer in town, GM, shuts down. The author shows the macro picture of the challenges that come from retraining an aging workforce (her research findings may surprise you), and the micro picture of how individual families cope when the high-paying jobs leave town and the struggle to hang on to a standard of living. The reader experiences the full range of emotions from stories of grief and sadness to inspiring tales of grit.  

• Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future: While five years old at this point, I still found this book eye-opening as it described how Artificial Intelligence (AI) was already impacting a variety of fields. 

• Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic.This crisis has devastated so many families and so many communities. This book provides a timeline and its in-depth research describes how an underground economy spread from city to city to reach epidemic proportions. 

• Getting Life: An Innocent Man’s 25-Year Journey from Prison to Peace. How does a man, wrongly convicted of murdering his wife, come to peace after spending 25 years in prison for a crime he didn't commit? 

About the Author

Tim Ranzetta

Tim's saving habits started at seven when a neighbor with a broken hip gave him a dog walking job. Her recovery, which took almost a year, resulted in Tim getting to know the bank tellers quite well (and accumulating a savings account balance of over $300!). His recent entrepreneurial adventures have included driving a shredding truck, analyzing executive compensation packages for Fortune 500 companies and helping families make better college financing decisions. After volunteering in 2010 to create and teach a personal finance program at Eastside College Prep in East Palo Alto, Tim saw firsthand the impact of an engaging and activity-based curriculum, which inspired him to start a new non-profit, Next Gen Personal Finance.