We review books that deal with everything from financial independence topics to politics, and anything in between. We may sometimes stray into films and music if there is a “Findependence” angle.
I start with Die with Zero because it most directly deals with the topic of money as we age. In fact, as most retirees know, one of the biggest fears behind the whole retirement saving concept is running out of money before you run out of life.
But it appears that many of us have become so fixated with saving for retirement, we may end up wasting much of our precious life energy, and being the proverbial richest inhabitant of the cemetery. For you super savers out there, this book may be an eye opener, as is the other book, 4,000 Weeks.
As I note in the column, this genre of personal finance started with Die Broke, by Stephen Pollan and Mark Levine, which I read shortly after it was first published in 1998. That’s where I encountered the amusing quip that “The last check you write should be to your undertaker … and it should bounce.”
The premise is similar in both books: there are trade-offs between time, money and health. Indeed, as you can see from the cover shot above, its subtitle is Getting all you can from your money and your life. As with another influential book, Your Money or Your Life, we exchange our time and life energy for money, which can therefore be viewed as a form of stored life energy. So if you die with lots of money, you’ve in effect “wasted” some of your precious life energy. Similarly, if you encounter mobility issues or other afflictions in your 70s or 80s, you may not be able to travel and engage in many activities that you may have thought you had been “saving up” for.
A treatise on Life’s Brevity and appreciating the moment
Amazon.com
The companion book is Four Thousand Weeks : Time Management for Mortals, by Oliver Burkeman. If you haven’t already guessed, 4,000 weeks is roughly the number of weeks someone will live if they reach age 77 [77 years multiplied by 52 equals 4,004.] Even the oldest person on record, Jeanne Calment, lived only 6,400 weeks, having died at age 122.
I actually enjoyed this book more than Die with Zero. It’s more philosophical and amusing in spots. Some of the more intriguing chapters are “Becoming a better procrastinator” and “Cosmic Insignificance Therapy.” I underlined way too many passages to flag here but here’s a sample from the former chapter: “The core challenge of managing our limited time isn’t about how to get everything done – that’s never going to happen – but how to decide most wisely what not to do … we need to learn to get better at procrastinating.”
Added Note on July 4, 2024, America’s Independence Day
American stock markets are closed today for Independence Day. I wish all Americans a happy holiday.
This blog originally ran in February but in light of the momentous events of the past week, we’re republishing and updating it. In fact, emotions have been so raw the last week that some corners of the web fret that July 4, 2024 may turn out to be the last Independence Day.
I doubt that but the events since last Thursday certainly have grabbed the world’s attention, as well as Canada’s: as ever, when the elephant south of the border sneezes, we in the great white north catch a cold.
Those new developments are of course President Biden’s disastrous debate last Thursday, June 27th, and then this week’s equally dismaying Supreme Court ruling (on July 1) to grant the Former Guy immunity for any official acts while he was president.
If Democracy seemed on shaky footing back in February, it seems doubly so today, roughly four months from the November election. But that’s still enough time to read the four books highlighted in this blog, and perhaps act on them.
Back to the original text in the blog, which has also been revised and updated where appropriate:
While Findependence Hub’s focus is primarily on investing, personal finance and Retirement, Findependence has given me sufficient leisure time to absorb a lot of content on politics and the ongoing battle to preserve democracy and in particular American democracy. What’s the point of achieving Financial Independence for oneself and one’s family, if you find yourself suddenly living in a fascist autocracy?
To that end, I have recently read four excellent books that summarize where we are, where we have come from and where we likely may be going. (Note, this blog is an update of what I wrote in late November, but with two books added.)
In contrast to two of the books mentioned below, Heather Cox Richardson’s Democracy Awakening is disturbingly current and explicitly names names. There is an extensive recap of The Former Guy’s attempt to highjack the 2020 election and the subsequent event of January 6th and everything that has occurred since.
Yes, I’m sick of reading about him too, which is why I don’t even name him here (even on social media accounts I prefer to use 45). But after his deranged Thanksgiving rant and an equally insane Christmas greeting on the soon-to-be defunct Truth Social (aka Pravda Social), his behaviour has become nothing short of alarming.
On other words, what may have seemed alarmist warnings in these books six months ago now seem scarily more relevant and likely to pass. So what do these books actually say about past dictatorships of history and the possibility of another one coming to pass in the not-too-distant future?
Reclaiming America
Richardson is a history professor at Boston College. For Canadians in particular the book is a valuable primer on the founding of America, the Declaration of Independence, the civil war, the Constitution and its many amendments, the creation of the Democratic and Republican parties, and the politics of the last few centuries. I assume most well-read American readers are taught this in grade school (although maybe not, judging by the millions of deluded MAGA zealots.)
The book itself is divided into three main parts: Undermining Democracy, The Authoritarian Experiment, and Reclaiming America.
Richardson make frequent references to Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. As she writes in the foreword:
“Hitler’s rise to absolute power began with his consolidation of political influence to win 36.8 percent of the vote in 1932, which he parlayed into a deal to become German chancellor. The absolute dictatorship came afterward. Democracies die more often through the ballot box than at gunpoint.”
She goes on to write that a small group of people “have made war on American democracy,” leading the country “toward authoritarianism by creating a disaffected population and promising to re-create an imagined past where those people could feel important again.” In other words, MAGA.
I’ll skip to the ending but again urge readers to get a copy and read everything between these snippets:
“Once again, we are at a time of testing. How it comes out rests, as it always has, in our own hands.”
Amazon.ca
Hitler: Ascent 1889-1939
Even since I wrote the original version of this blog in November, the press has been full of alarming reports of 45’s Hitler-like rhetoric early in 2024: famously his references to vermin and to immigrants poisoning the blood of the American people, both from the original Hitler playbook. And who can forget his “dictator only on the first day,” an alarming recent example of many a truth said in jest?
A two-book series by Volker Ullrich looks first at Hitler’s political rise and then to his decline and defeat in the second World War that he created.The second book is titled Hitler: Downfall: 1939-1945.
While most of us may think we know this history going back to high-school history classes, not to mention numerous histories, novels and films about World War II, Hitler: Ascent is nevertheless a bracing refresher course.
Ullrich charts Hitler’s improbable rise from failed artist to political rabble rouser, to his failed beerhall putsch in the 1920s, his writing of Mein Kampf after a too-short prison sentence and ultimately his stunning January 1933 manoeuvre to become the Chancellor of Germany, which he soon consolidated as combined chancellor/president and ultimately the dictator he is now known to be.
The book also makes clear his goals for creating a Greater Germany at the expense of most of his European neighbours (famously Poland and France), and his plans for impossibly grandiose architectural structures to be implemented by Albert Speer, with Berlin (to be renamed Germania) the centre of what he hoped would be a global dictatorship.
The second Ullrich book — Hitler: Downfall, 1939-1945 — is also well worth reading. The final sentences are particularly relevant to today’s environment:
If Hitler’s “life and career teaches us anything, it is how quickly democracy can be prised from its hinges when political institutions fail and civilizing forces in society are too weak to combat the lure of authoritarianism; how thin the mantle separating civilization and barbarism actually is; and what human beings are capable of when the rule of law and ethical norms are suspended and some people are granted unlimited power over the lives of others.”
Of course, for most of us, reading yet another book (or two) about Adolf Hitler doesn’t usually create undue anxiety, since it all seems to be comfortably in the faraway past. Ancient history, as they say. Continue Reading…
My latest MoneySense Retired Money column focuses on a free retirement calculator called PERC, plus the accompanying new third edition of Fred Vettese’s book, Retirement Income for Life: Getting More Without Saving More.
As the column notes, I have previously reviewed the earlier editions of the book but any retiree or near retiree will find it invaluable and well worth the C$26.95 price. Also, there is a free eBook offer.
PERC of course is an acronym and stands for Personal Enhanced Retirement Calculator.
PERC is itself a chapter title (chapter 15 of the third edition) and constitutes the fourth of five “enhancements” Vettese describes for getting more without saving more. Vettese developed PERC while writing the first edition in 2018: it is available at no charge at perc-pro.ca.
In another generous offer, anyone who buys the print edition can get a free ebook version by emailing details of proof of purchase to ebook@ecwpress.com.
Jeremy Siegel recently wrote, with Jeremy Schwartz, the sixth edition of his popular book, Stocks for the long Run: The Definitive Guide to Financial Market Returns and Long-Term Investment Strategies.
I read the fifth edition nearly a decade ago, and because the book is good enough to reread, this sixth edition gave me the perfect opportunity to read it again.
I won’t repeat comments from my first review. I’ll stick to material that either I chose not to comment on earlier, or is new in this edition.
Bonds and Inflation
“Yale economist Irving Fisher” has had a “long-held belief that bonds were overrated as safe investments in a world with uncertain inflation.” Investors learned this lesson the hard way recently as interest rates spiked at a time when long-term bonds paid ultra-low returns. This created double-digit losses in bond investments, despite the perception that bonds are safe. Siegel adds “because of the uncertainty of inflation, bonds can be quite risky for long-term investors.”
The lesson here is that inflation-protected bonds offer lower risk, and long-term bonds are riskier than short-term bonds.
Mean Reversion
While stock returns look like a random walk in the short term, Figure 3.2 in the book shows that the long-term volatility of stocks and bonds refutes the random-walk hypothesis. Over two or three decades, stocks are less risky than the random walk hypothesis would predict, and bonds are riskier.
Professors Robert Stombaugh and Luboš Pástor disagree with this conclusion, claiming that factors such as parameter and model uncertainty make stocks look riskier a priori than they look ex post. Siegel disagrees with “their analysis because they assume there is a certain, after inflation (i.e., real) risk-free financial instrument that investors can buy to guarantee purchasing power for any date in the future.” Siegel says that existing securities based on the Consumer Price Index (CPI) have flaws. CPI is an imperfect measure of inflation, and there is the possibility that future governments will manipulate CPI. Continue Reading…
Joe Biden this week carrying a copy of Democracy Awakening, via Threads.
While the Hub’s focus is primarily on investing, personal finance and Retirement, Findependence has given me sufficient leisure time to absorb a lot of content on politics and the ongoing battle to preserve democracy and in particular American democracy. What’s the point of achieving Financial Independence for oneself and one’s family, if you find yourself suddenly living in a fascist autocracy?
To that end, I have recently read two excellent books that summarize where we are, where we have come from and where we likely may be going. These books came to my attention from two relatively new social media sites I joined in the past year.
For those who care, I am still on Twitter (now X) but restrict most of my posts there to the financial matters on which this blog focuses. I post there as @JonChevreau, which is the same handle I have on Mastodon (since Nov 6, 2022) and Threads, which I joined a week after its early July launch this summer. Threads is now almost the polar opposite of X politically, a veritable Blue haven: just last week Joe & Jill Biden both signed on as @potus and @flotus respectively, as well as under their real names. So did vice president Kamala Harris (posting as @VP and @kamalaharris).
Amazon.ca
But back to the books. The first must read is Prequel, by the brilliant U.S. broadcaster Rachel Maddow [cover image shown on the left]. Tellingly, it’s subtitled An American Fight Against Fascism.
The second is Democracy Awakening, by Heather Cox Richardson [cover shown below]. Both are available as ebooks on the Libby app, through (hopefully) your local library. I couldn’t find either book on Scribd (now called Everand) but they do have ebook Summaries of both.
An American Hitler?
Given that the 2024 U.S. election is now about 12 months away, there is a certain urgency to these books. The Maddow book I’d read first since it’s a brilliant historical recap of the rise of German Fascism in the 1930s and — the shocking bit! — how close Germany came to installing fascists in America. It’s literally about Germany’s search for an American Hitler it hoped to install. It’s full of sinister characters you’ve probably not heard about before, like the assassinated Huey Long.
Maddow credits the reader with enough intelligence to extrapolate from that period into the current dangerous environment. One is left to infer how she feels about the parallels to the modern GOP and its fascist leader and would-be dictator: she never says their names although she is usually more explicit in her MSNBC and podcast commentaries.
Modern readers could easily substitute Putin’s Russia for Hitler’s Germany and draw their own conclusions about the parallels to collusion with foreign powers. There are also similarities between protracted attempts by the U.S. government to try the perpetrators in court and the protracted Delay tactics of the Defence — including many U.S. senators of the 1930s and early 1940s. And as is currently the case, these tactics largely seemed to work, since the Allies won World War II before most of the collaborators were brought to justice. Frustrating indeed, as many of today’s Americans bristled at the ultimate futility of the Mueller Report around 2019 and other protracted legal proceedings that may not be resolved before the 2024 election.
Maddow of course hints at this right at the end, quoting one frustrated prosecutor (O. John Rogge) from the 1940s:
“The study of how one totalitarian government attempted to penetrate our country may help us with another totalitarian country attempting to do the same thing …the American people should be told about the fascist threat to democracy.”
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