On Your Own Two Feet by Helen Baker: An Honest Review

📖 What is On Your Own Two Feet about?🔗

On Your Own Two Feet is a comprehensive guide to financial independence for women across every life stage, from your 20s through to retirement and beyond. First published in 2014 and revised in 2021, the update added new material on aged care, personal injury and legislative changes. Helen Baker walks readers through her financial fundamentals: building an emergency fund, creating a spending and investment plan, getting the right insurances, growing your super, and putting an estate plan in place.

Beyond the basics, the book tackles the money situations other personal finance titles tend to skip: relationship breakdown, the financial impact of losing a partner, aged care planning, and how to rebuild financial security from scratch. That coverage reflects what Baker actually sees in her practice. She's one of the very few licensed financial advisers in Australia writing directly for women, which means the advice is grounded in Australian tax law, super rules and family law rather than theory. She's since written a companion book focused entirely on the finances of divorce.

⚖️ Strengths and weaknesses🔗

👤 Who should read it, and who should skip it?🔗

🔍 What do critics say?🔗

The formal critical response has been positive, if measured. Reviewers praise Baker's personal story and the case studies throughout, and describe it as a good, approachable read. The main recurring observation is the breadth-over-depth point: covering all life stages and scenarios means an individual reader won't always find the exact depth they want for their specific situation. That's a fair critique, and more a structural reality of what the book is trying to do than a flaw. Baker's standing in the profession lends the content real weight.

💬 What do readers say?🔗

Honestly, the book has a smaller public review footprint than the big-name titles: there's no major Goodreads presence and little dedicated r/AusFinance discussion, which is not unusual for a specialist Australian finance book and doesn't reflect its quality or reach.

🇦🇺 The Australian angle🔗

This matters more than it might seem. The gender super gap is real and significant: Australian women retire with substantially less super than men on average, driven by career breaks for caring responsibilities, higher rates of part-time work, and the ongoing gender pay gap. Baker addresses this directly, covering super strategy specific to women's working patterns, including voluntary contributions during career breaks and how to think about super when you're working part-time.

Australian family law matters too. Property settlements, super splitting and the financial aftermath of separation are governed by Australian law, so a US book on divorce and money is essentially useless here. The same goes for insurance through super, binding death benefit nominations, and estate planning. Most personal finance books aimed at women in Australia are American imports full of 401(k)s and Social Security references that don't apply. A guide written by an Australian licensed adviser is genuinely rare. For more women-focused reads, see our She's on the Money review and Girls Just Wanna Have Funds review.

💰 The verdict🔗

Yes, for most Australian women who want a practical, no-jargon financial reference written by someone who actually holds an Australian financial services licence, this is an easy recommendation. The breadth-over-depth trade-off is real and worth knowing going in: this isn't a book that takes you from zero to advanced investor in one read. What it will do is give you a solid, Australian-specific foundation across the full range of financial decisions women face across a lifetime, including the ones (divorce, widowhood, aged care) most books skip entirely. That's genuinely valuable, and genuinely rare. Our rating: 4 out of 5.

❓ Frequently asked questions🔗