Tag Archives: book reviews

Retired Money: What I’m reading this summer in personal finance

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My latest MoneySense Retired Money column is a mini review of roughly a dozen personal finance or Retirement books I’ve been reading of late, or intending to finish. You can find the full column by clicking on the highlighted headline here: 12 Top Personal Finance books to read this summer.

First up are a couple of macroeconomics books: Graham Summers’ The Everything Bubble: The Endgame for Central Bank Policy, first published in 2017. It describes what the author calls “serial bubbles” – not just stocks but virtually every asset class, including fixed income and real estate. The book also tackles the two sources of financial repression for retirees hoping to live on interest income: ZIRP and NIRP, which stand respectively for Zero Interest Rate Policy and Negative Interest Rate Policy.

Like it or not, the November 2020 U.S. election is likely to have an impact on investors and would-be retirees, no matter how it works out. Two years ago, my MoneySense column reviewed several other Trump books in an attempt to understand the investment implications of his presidency.

Have we reached Peak Trump?

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Since then, I’ve also read Peak Trump: The Undrainable Swamp and the Fantasy of MAGA, by David Stockman, published in 2019.  Peak Trump includes a chapter also titled The Everything Bubble. Stockman believes the Trump boom – aided by the Federal Reserve’s “rotten regime of Bubble Finance” — has been a mirage and is fated to fade away. Presidential incumbents usually win re-election if the economy and stock market stay strong, but that’s hardly a slam dunk after the depression-level unemployment and social unrest that has come about in the wake of Covid-19.

Dual citizen and political pundit David Frum has just released his second Trump book: Trumpocalypse: Restoring American Democracy, a followup to his earlier Trumpocracy, which was mentioned in the link above. The blizzard of online and media reviews seem to suggest Frum believes Trump has lost the plot and may be vulnerable in the upcoming election.

With all this talk of asset bubbles and negative interest rates, it seems everyone is fated to worry about money and not just near-retirees. Worry-Free Money, by financial planner Shannon Lee Simmons, was published in 2017, and will primarily interest younger investors with a long time horizon. Simmons declares “everyone is worried about money” and says social media has only aggravated the situation. But if you’re worried she will nag you about things like budgeting, fear not: she gives reasons why “you need to stop budgeting.” Rather, you have to control your spending, living within your “hard limit” and say “No” to unhappy spending.

The Joy of Being Retired

For those closer to Retirement The Joy of Being Retired, by the prolific Edmonton-based international self-publishing master Ernie J. Zelinski, is a light read, with 365 reasons (and cartoons) on why Retirement Rocks “and Work Sucks.” Continue Reading…

The Greatest Prospector in the World

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7ca4643d950f4bd09e96de75113a3031-GP_Cover_frontThe Greatest Prospector in the World is the title of a new work of “Business Fiction” focusing on the six “secrets” of sales prospecting success. The author is Ken Dunn, CEO and Founder of Las Vegas based Next Century Publishing.

The six secrets are slowly revealed over the course of a charming tale that begins in the year 1910, a story Dunn describes in the book’s subtitle as “A Historically Accurate Parable on Creating Success in Sales, Business, & Life.”

For those who wish to skip on to the six secrets, they are laid out in the short Afterword, in which Dunn acknowledges a literary debt to Jim Stovall’s Ultimate Life Series and Og Mandino’s classic The Greatest Salesman in the World.

Dunn himself is no slouch in the world of sales prospecting: after an early career in police work he started businesses in property management, finance, direct sales and publishing.

You can find more at the book’s web site, www.greatestprospector.com. Also check out Dunn’s recently launched ReadersLegacy.com, which is a kind of Facebook for book lovers. In an interview in his Toronto offices, Dunn described Reader’s Legacy as “Facebook meets Amazon.” The site even features a kind of literary currency called “Lit Coins,” (reminiscent of Bit Coins).

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Kenn Dunn (Twitter.com)

The 6 secrets of Sales Prospecting

I’ll reveal the titles of the secrets but you really need to read the story to get the context. As the cover image shows, it’s all about prospecting for gold nuggets.

Here are the six secrets:

1.) Dress for the Weather

2.) Know what you’re looking for

3.) Use the right tools

4.) Get in the River, Even when you don’t want to

5.) Make it Fun

6.) Work Hard for Six Days, Rest for One

 

 

 

Book Review — Tony Robbins’ Money: Master the Game

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We’ve been reviewing books about financial independence here at the Hub since our launch early in November 2014 and long before that at FindependenceDay.com, as well as the Financial Post, MoneySense and Maclean’s. Up until now, the books reviewed on this site have been read and reviewed by me. But it’s almost impossible to read everything, even if the focus is as narrow as financial independence and the author is someone as prominent as Tony Robbins. So starting with this guest post, we’re going to widen the net with this review of Robbins’ new book by Tea at Taxevity’s Promod Sharma. We will certainly consider reviews of other financial books by objective sources. If you’re an author looking to be reviewed and willing to supply a review copy of your book, contact me at jonathan@findependencehub.com. If you’d like to try reviewing other books at the Hub, contact me at the same email. As for the review of the new Robbins book, you can find the original review on Promod’s site here. You also can find two interviews Promod conducted with me over at Findependence.TV, before and after the site launch. Over to Promod! — Jonathan Chevreau
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Promod
Promod Sharma

By Promod Sharma,

Special to Financial Independence Hub

There are many reasons to read a book about money and there are lots of books about money. Tony Robbins has a new one, Money: Master The Game. Unfortunately, not many people read books. Even fewer read nonfiction. Only a small sliver read books about money. Be an exception and join them.

Not Perfect

robbinsbookThere are various criticisms of the book, such as:

  • being an outsider: but being outside the traditional financial community gives Tony a different perspective
  • contradicting advice: but that’s common in life. He interviews 50 money experts with varying views.
  • over-simplified: but isn’t that better than over-complicating and confusing? Complexity can be added once the A-B-Cs (or 1-2-3s) are known.
  • conflicts of interest: Tony recommends companies in which he might have financial interests (see dealing with biased financial advice). That doesn’t mean the choices are bad but they but warrant more investigation.
  • too long: yes … I got the audiobook, which runs over 21 hours and sped up the playback by 30%
  • US-centric: yes but the general ideas apply everywhere

Tony responded to some criticism in this interview for The Wall Street Journal.

At the other extreme, you’ll find gushing praise.

Tony’s Advantage

Do celebrities give better financial advice? Maybe not but Tony reaches the unreachable: people who get missed by conventional financial education. Even when Tony says things you’ve heard before, you might be more likely to believe them now. For instance, I’ve covered things like

We often know the keys about money (e.g., spend less than you earn, disaster-proof your life, save for the future). That doesn’t mean we do. Tony helps people change. He might get you to change too. He has a knack for making financial education engaging. He explains his terms and uses many examples.

Differently

Instead of writing a book, Tony could have created videos and an app. That’s what I thought before getting the book. I don’t see videos, but he has a free app (if you’re willing to give your contact information).

Instead of using a conventional publisher, Tony could have self-published. He could have made the book cheaper. He could have narrated the full audiobook, rather than portions.

Overall, what he did is fine.

Free Meals

Tony is paying for 50 million free meals. Besides donating all his book royalties, he’s made an additional personal financial contribution. That’s rare. Chances are good that you’ll end up on his mailing list, though. That gives him the opportunity to sell you his other stuff with the money you’re saving.

Caution

Tony tackles tough topics such as the conflicts of interest rampant in the financial sector. He gives solutions too. Think before you leap.

The stories from successes like Richard Branson are interesting but may not provide much practical guidance (e.g., how Honest Ed turned $212 into $100 million). Look for patterns rather than a guaranteed formula to financial independence.

I wasn’t expecting much from Tony’s book but because he’s popular, I knew that I had an obligation to read it. Overall, I’m impressed and highly recommend Money: Master The Game. There’s lots of practical advice.

Money books get stale. Tony’s book is new, which means now is the best time to read it.

Links

PS Another must-read (or re-read) is Warren Buffett’s biography, The Snowball.

Three views of Putin’s Russia: one fiction, two reality

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9780374533106_day-of-the-oprichnikBy Jonathan Chevreau

Day of the Oprichnik is a futuristic Russian novel has little to do with Financial Independence but with that disclosed, let me add that I think investors need to keep a close eye on what remains the United States’ biggest nuclear rival.

This week’s issue of The Economist is a good place to start, with a cover story on Vladimir Putin:  Putin’s War on the West, as well as this in-depth feature on What Russia Wants.

As we noted in an earlier Hub review of a trio of books on Putin’s Russia, when you add in the geopolitics of plunging oil prices and the perpetual skirmishes with the Chetchens  and the escalating brinkmanship in the Ukraine, it might be useful for investors to keep tabs on this rogue Capitalist state.

As so often is the case, art sometimes imitates life and sometimes anticipates it. Day of the Oprichnik was published nine years ago and is looking more and more prescient. Vladimir Sorokin, born in 1955, is a prize-winning novelist based in Moscow and also wrote The Ice Trilogy. Day of the Oprichnik was published in Russia in 2006 and the first American translation was only in 2012.

Below, we also look at two more recent non-fiction books on Putin’s Russia: 2013’s Fragile Kingdom and the just-published (2015) Red Notice.

Destined for Silver Screen?

But first, back to the novel. To sum it up in a sentence, I’d say Day of the Oprichnik is a combination of A Clockwork Orange and Fahrenheit 401, Continue Reading…

Will “Unretirement” launch your Encore Act?

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BN-ER243_bkrvun_GV_20140923135029By Jonathan Chevreau

Unretirement is a concept not unlike Findependence or Financial Independence; it’s also the title of a recently published book by Chris Farrell, Bloomberg Businessweek columnist and senior economics contributor for American Public Media’s syndicated radio show, Marketplace.

I’ve also seen the term Unretirement used by Sun Life Financial in Canada but that seems to be more a marketing term the company uses to promote its surveys on traditional retirement. That survey has been going for six years now, which certainly predates the publication of Farrell’s Unretirement Continue Reading…