WASHINGTON -- (BEG ITAL)No es facil hablar de dinero(END ITAL).

In English this means, it's not easy to talk about money.

For many people, the language of money is like trying to learn a foreign language. It can be frustrating.

There are many books that seek to help you learn the language. And every month, I search for those I find useful or unique.

For this month's Color of Money Book Club pick, I'm recommending a book that literally translates the language of money.

Lynn Jimenez, an award-winning business reporter for KGO Radio 810 in San Francisco, has written "Se Habla Dinero?: The Everyday Guide to Financial Success" (Wiley, $19.95). What's so fabulous about this book, which was published last year, is from the table of contents to the index, Jimenez provides side-by-side Spanish and English translation. On the left-side pages is the Spanish, and on the right, the English.

Although anyone will benefit from this basic personal finance guide, Jimenez wrote this bilingual book to appeal specifically to multigenerational Hispanic families.

"Like the U.S. population as a whole, Latinos are feeling the sting of the economic downturn," reports the Pew Hispanic Center. In a January survey, the center noted that 9 percent of Latino homeowners said they had missed a mortgage payment or were unable to make a full payment.

The survey found that Latinos hold a more negative view of their own current personal financial situation than does the general U.S. population. Seventy-six percent of those polled said their current personal finances are in either fair or poor shape. That was compared with 63 percent of the general U.S. population reporting concern about their financial situation.

Despite their financial challenges and concerns, Hispanics are moving into this nation's middle class at a rapid pace, Jimenez writes.

The fastest-growing portion of the Hispanic market is among households earning $50,000 or more a year. Hispanic consumer spending clout will rise from $212 billion in 1990 to a projected $1.4 trillion in 2013, according to the Selig Center for Economic Growth at the University of Georgia's Terry College of Business. Continued...