Can I Retire? is part of his “100 Pages or Less” series, and, well, the main text of the book ends squarely on page 99, so it’s truth in advertising.  His motivation in putting this series together was to give essential information on a particular topic in a size that wouldn’t be so daunting to read.  He fully admits that his book is just the beginning of answering the question in the title, so with that in mind, I read the book.

I enjoyed it.  The book was well written and free of financial jargon, but at the same time I didn’t feel like I was in third grade while reading it.  It was a quick read; I got through it in maybe 1 1/2 hours, and part of the time I was riding up to a friend’s house.  Which, again, is the point of the book:  It’s an approachable and doable introduction to the topic.

Standard topics with some essential details

The topics are nothing terribly mind-blowing:

• Calculating how much you’ll need to retire
• The 4% withdrawal rate rule
• Single-premium immediate annuities
• Index funds, exchange-traded funds, bonds
• IRAs and IRA accounts
• Tax consequences of conversions, rollovers, and the like
• Social Security

I picked up a number of things along the way.  Here are a couple of them:

• Dollar-cost averaging is a two-edged sword.  In a rising market, dollar cost averaging helps to automate the process of buying low (to sell high later).  But in a falling (or fallen) market, withdrawing a fixed amount has the opposite effect: selling low.
• The overview of annuities is very good.  I knew vaguely what annuities were but Chapter 4 laid the basics out very well, especially the pros and cons of annuities, fixed return vs. variable return annuities, and diversifying annuities.
• Having a tiered risk/reward investment structure in retirement is a good idea.  The idea and explanation of having short-, mid-, and long-term investments in retirement was clearly presented.  (Long-term in retirement is more than five years out.)

All in all, this was a well-organized introduction to answering the question of Can I Retire? and I recommend it.  The Kindle edition is certainly worth $5 if you’re new to retirement planning.

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Personal finance authors have it pretty tough these days.  With so many personal finance books on the market, it’s always a challenge to present a unique view on the topic.  Some of the (small number of) critical reviews (one- and two-star reviews) of this on Amazon mentioned that the advice given in parts of the book was nothing new.  But I don’t hold that against any personal finance author, because good personal finance advice truly is “nothing new.”  Spending less than you make will always be good financial advice, and it always has been.  Of course.

Approach a new finance book looking for that one good idea

Given that some of the stuff will be things that you’ve heard before — like “live within your means,” “pay off your debts,” “embrace the magic of compound interest,” etc. — treat the book as a treasure hunt.  Look for new spins on parts of the topic.  Look for that One Good Idea that will more than make up the cost of the book — maybe pay you back hundreds of times.

The book has eighteen chapters:

1. The Savvy Life Philosophy
2. The Golden Rule
3. Savvy Habits
4. You Can Afford It
5. Where We Spend Our Money
6. Home
7. Entertainment
8. Wardrobe
9. Beauty
10. Food
11. Money
12. What is Important to You?
13. Savvy Shopping
14. Celebrity Savvy Life Role Models
15. The Core of the Savvy Life
16. Tricks to Stay Motivated
17. Your Savvy Life
18. Favorite Resources

(I’ll let you in on a confession.  I didn’t spend a whole lot of time on the Beauty chapter.  Now that that’s out of the way …)

Different people will resonate with different chapters of the book.  For me, it was the chapter on food.  What hit me right between the eyes was this statement on page 138:

There is no longer an excuse of not knowing how to cook.

That knocked me back a couple of feet, because I really don’t know how to cook, and I know how easy it is to grab a sub at Sheetz, or grab Chinese at my favorite takeout place.  But knowing how to cook really does make a big difference.  My parents know how to cook — both of them.  And they both happen to be quite well off now.  I know there’s a connection between how much you eat in and what your net worth is.  So this chapter gave me several good ideas on tackling the problem of eating out too much.

The other “good idea treasure trove” was the chapter on Home.  One example related directly to the chapter on Food:

Keeping a clean home also helps save you money.  When the kitchen is clean and there are no dirty dishes in the sink, it’s much more inviting to cook.

So after reading this I try a little more to stay on top of the dishes — and the kitchen in general — to make it more inviting.  And it also brings a small improved sense of control, which feeds positively on other areas.

Overall, I enjoyed the book.  It doesn’t take a whole lot of new stuff in a book for it to be worth my while.  If I get a good idea out of the book — and I got several out of this book — then it’s worth my time.

And I think that Living the Savvy Life will be worth yours as well.

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It’s always a challenge to put a unique spin on frugal living, because the ever-present theme of “living below your means” tends to be as exciting as watching a couple of pennies turn green.  Mr. Yeager wrote a book on frugal living that was fun to read.  Mr. Yeager is a lively writer with a delightfully corny sense of humor.  The bulk of the book is his conversations with various and sundry cheapskates across the nation and the lessons we can learn from them.  Throughout he’s peppered “Cheap Shots” — little money-saving tips to which he’s affixed a dollar amount for the savings that you, the reader, can realize by carrying through.

The book has sixteen chapters:

1. The Phrenology of Frugality: 16 Idiosyncrasies of the Cheapskate Mind
2. Good Habits Are Hard to Break
3. Money Management, Cheapskate Style
4. The Oxygen Mask Approach to Raising Kids (think airplanes here)
5. Thrift: The Greenest Shade of Green
6. Clean Your Plate . . . and Save $1,500 a Year
7. Come on and Take a FREE Ride
8. We Can’t Retire.  We Went out to Dinner Instead.
9. The Joys of Horse Trading
10. Break the Mortgage Chains that Bind Thee
11. Bon Appe-cheap! Come on into the Cheapskate’s Kitchen
12. Don’t Laugh.  It Gets Me There . . . and It’s Paid For.
13. Cheapskates Come out of the Closet
14. Insurance: Betting on Yourself
15. Cheapskates Just Wanna Have Fun
16. Back to the Future?

Everyone picks out different nuggets from books with a lot of good ideas in them, and this book is no exception.  Here are a few that rang true with me:

• Buying things made out of 93% post-consumer waste isn’t green. Not buying the stuff in the first place is.  Daniel Newman, a person Yeager quotes in the book in Chapter 5, page 103, said: “Cheap equals green.  I’d go a step further and say that cheap is the only green.  It’s not about consuming green products.  It’s about consuming less.”
• “Don’t sell yourself short by naming a price.” (Chapter 9, page 139) This is in reference to haggling, and hearkens back to when I read Roger Dawson’s Secrets of Power Negotiating: The first person who speaks loses.  I recently bought a drum set from a pawn shop.  The marked price was $450.  If push came to shove I’d probably have paid $425, but I asked the guy what he could do on the set.  He came in at $325.  I would have paid $100 more than I needed to if I had offered my price first.
• “Shopping isn’t a cheapskate sport.” (Chapter 1, page 25-26)  This one hit me at my core presents on The Interwebs:  “There’s a common perception — a misperception, in my experience — that “cheapskate” is synonymous with “bargain hunter.”  Ouch, that hurts a little bit.   But the point is well-taken: The drive to not shop at all is more cheapskate-ly than the drive to shop for the best price.

I recommend Jeff Yeager’s book The Cheapskate Next Door.  No doubt just one good idea that hits your thrifty bone in the book will pay for the book many times over.

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The book is well-written.  The book has twelve chapters, and is compiled from many sources and numerous interviews with young professionals.  There is an extensive endnote section.  The main sections of the chapter largely describe the interviews she conducted, weaving them with the rest of her sources to express the topics of the chapters, which are:

1. The Joy of Spending
2. Job Juggling
3. The Upside of Debt
4. Investing for Smarties
5. Not Your Parents’ Retirement
6. When Parents Are Landlords (or Tenants)
7. Lessons in Modern Frugality
8. Love, Rings, and Mortgages
9. Babies and Bank Accounts
10. Green Spending
11. The New Rules of Philanthropy
12. Nonprofit Dreamin’

Throughout each chapter there are several sidebars that contain more specific advice, which are good for readers who want actionable tips.  At the end of each chapter there are several questions for personal application of the material.

First, a couple of beefs.  Regarding her chapter on debt (Chapter 3) I’m more of a Larry Winget or Dave Ramsey kind of guy when it comes to debt, so I felt she could have taken a harder line on debt reduction than she did.  It was there, but ehhh.  On the opposite end, I felt there was far too much discussion in Chapter 8 on the financial issues of moving in with one’s boyfriend/girlfriend.  Just because an activity is commonplace doesn’t mean that it needs to be given credence.

Overall, though, the good points outweighed my beefs.  I did like that earning a second income in a different field was discussed (Chapter 2).  It’s supremely important to have a fall-back position in case one’s main gig doesn’t work out.  A home business offers the greatest risk / reward, and what better time to start than when you don’t absolutely have to?  The chapter on moving back in with relatives (Chapter 6) had a positive tone to it.  I have family members that are doing this.  For some the arrangement seems good for all concerned, and for others it’s little more than one party enabling the other.  If I hadn’t seen it work with some close relatives, I would have been hard-pressed to agree that coming back to the nest should be anything but failure, but it’s not all bad.  Chapter 10 discusses what’s really “green,” and what isn’t.  Lastly, Chapter 12 was the first real discussion I’d seen that broaches the subject of creating a nonprofit organization.  Most people would know that they can write a check to their favorite charity, but might think that their very own 501(c)(3) would be out of reach.

Anyway, Generation Earn is a polished book with take-aways you probably haven’t seen before.  I invite you to check it out!

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Mr. Steuer’s goal was “to use [his] experience to provide you with a useful reference tool.”  The book was not really meant to be read from cover to cover, but to be used as a reference.

I admit myself that I didn’t read the whole book cover to cover (or even a majority of it), but I was very impressed in particular with the completeness of his answer to question 3.  This question was: “How much life insurance do I need?”

An easy answer to this question — one that I had heard of before — is “five to eight times your annual income.”   This is an answer, but it always rang about as true as the statement that “an engagement ring should cost two months’ salary.”  That is, it’s a nice big juicy marketing figure disguised as traditional advice.

Mr. Steuer does mention the “multiple of income” method for estimating the amount of life insurance needed, but quickly classifies this as a “best guess,” and one that is probably too simplistic to be used by itself.  He also classifies the “cover your debts” amount as too simplistic.

In total, he spends twenty-four pages answering this question, complete with worksheets.  The questions and answers take up 300 pages of the book, so he dedicates over ten times the space to this question that a typical question would get (2.2 pages).  He does a bang-up job answering this question.  I really came away feeling that I understood how awfully important it is to take a careful survey of how much life insurance is necessary.  This is good, because missing badly in either direction can be devastating: having too much life insurance is unnecessarily costly, and having too little could result in a world of hurt for the people you’re trying to protect.

His complete, thoughtful answer to this one question is worth the price of the book. And there are 133 other questions he answers!  The ones I did read were surprisingly understandable.

I invite you to put my review to the test and check out Questions and Answers on Life Insurance.

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I’ve read a few of them, not because I’m a particularly fast reader but because they’re super-quick reads.  Truth in advertising: it even says so on the spines.  The ones I’ve read so far are The Skinny On Time Management, The Skinny On Credit Cards, and The Skinny On The Housing Crisis.

I enjoyed reading these books for a few reasons:

• There isn’t a lot of filler. I’ve read some other book series aimed at beginners, and parts of them got tedious because the pace was too slow.  (I don’t need a full chapter explaining how to open a Microsoft Access database, thank you very much.)  Not so with these books.
• The key points are hit. I wasn’t a beginner on the topics that I read about, so I know that he hit all of the important points.  The key points were summarized in the back pages, so if I wanted a shortened short version, I got that, too.
• There’s an appropriate mix of story, facts, quotes, action items, and humor. Not too hot, or too cold.  Just right.  Other books I’ve read were a little much on story.  The story was there in the books, but the plot and the jokes were subordinate to the material, which is what I think is desirable in books aiming to convey information.
• The text is easy to read both in the way it’s printed, and in the way it’s written.
• There were a number of suggestions in each book for further reading. The books open doors to deeper understanding of the topics.  He points toward books and authors that go into more depth.

Jim Randel shows that you don’t need (a) a lot of pages or (b) a fine arts degree to cover the basics of a topic.  To give the skinny on it, if you will.

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Well, my Bargaineering Bucks were burning a virtual hole in my electronic pseudo bank account, so I bid on Gregory Karp’s The 1-2-3 Money Plan: The Three Most Important Steps to Saving and Spending Smart, and won the auction.

I was impressed with the book.  It covers a broad variety of financial topics, including estate planning, discretionary spending, banking, insurance, telecom expenses, how to buy used things, saving for college, and more.  As the book title suggests, each topic is boiled down to its three most important takeaways.  Even the whole book is organized this way:

1. Spending Smart Yesterday (paying off debt)
2. Spending Smart Today (spending smarter on current expenses)
3. Spending Smart Tomorrow (saving for later)

What impressed me about the book the most, though, is that Mr. Karp didn’t shy away from giving specific recommendations.  He names mutual fund companies.  He gives website addresses.  He recommends online bank accounts.  These specific recommendations make it easy to take action immediately. He fully admits that the advice he gives isn’t perfect for everyone, but he does claim (and I agree) that it’s very good advice for most people.  And that’s about all one can hope for a broad-audience financial book, anyway.  Beyond that, a financial planner is necessary (he even talks about that subject!) because only they will be able to see what you actually have and what you actually need.

In line with the theme of the book, I’ll give three things from the book that caught my attention:

• Credit fraud alerts aren’t foolproof, mainly for the reason that not all lenders actually check for them when someone applies for a loan.
• You can make a target-date college or retirement portfolio more or less aggressive by changing the target date. These kinds of plans start “aggressive” (mostly equities) and move toward “conservative” (bonds or cash) as the target date is approached.  Making the target date earlier makes the portfolio more conservative; making it later makes it more aggressive.
• The average fee on an interest-bearing checking account is almost $12, according to a 2008 BankRate.com survey.  That floored me.  Makes me very thankful for my credit union.

There’s a lot of very good advice in the book, and certainly good advice that can be put into action immediately.  I recommend Gregory Karp’s The 1-2-3 Money Plan: The Three Most Important Steps to Saving and Spending Smart.

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This book was a very easy, quick read, and was very clear.  Mr. Skonieczny is the founder and president of Classic Value Investors LLC, so from that one might expect that the strategies in his book would have an emphasis on value investing — finding stocks that the market has currently priced well below a fair value for a share of the company’s earnings — and one would be correct.

He introduces key terms through the use of simple, familiar examples.  Assets, liabilities, inventory, equipment, profit, loss, income, expenses, return on equity, etc., as well as the process of initial public offering, dividends, and retained earnings, are illustrated through simple lemonade-stand-type examples.

From there, he’s in a position to discuss methods for researching companies in terms of their positioning relative to their competitors: who has the biggest moat?  Building upon the terminology introduced earlier, he shows how to calculate predicted earnings based on some simple assumptions, and then uses that to determine whether a stock is currently trading at a discount to this value or not.

Throughout I felt like I was led through his examples easily, and the discussion never got complicated.  This simplicity reminded me of Peter Lynch’s thesis in One Up on Wall Street, which was that most people already knew enough from their day-to-day experience to choose good companies to invest in.  It’s not exactly Mr. Skonieczny’s plan to “pick the next Microsoft” but given publicly available information it doesn’t require much specialized training to determine whether a stock is currently trading at a bargain or not.  The impression I got was that anyone could apply the analysis he was presenting.  This suggests that the book is accessible to many.

I enjoyed the book.  When I start checking out stocks again I’ll be sure to re-read my copy of Why Are We So Clueless about the Stock Market? and try crunching the numbers on a few prospects.

(Thanks to Money Relationship for including this in the Carnival of Personal Finance!)

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I enjoyed the book.  It was well-written.  (Mr. Gilbert has written a regular column for Bloomberg News for over a decade.)  What this book brings to the table is a more accessible description of financial constructs that were esoteric, if not non-existent, just a decade earlier.  After hearing about derivatives, collateralized debt obligations, credit-default swaps in the headlines as the giant banks were reeling, it was educational to read Complicit and fill in around the edges a bit.

Each chapter begins with a graph of something against time.  The “something” relates to the content of the chapter.  Here are the chapter titles, with the “Y axis” quantities in parentheses:

1. Bubbles are for Bathtubs (U.S. home ownership percentage)
2. Unsafe at Any Rating (Moody’s share price)
3. Priced for Perfection (Stock and Bond market volatility)
4. Bubbles, Bubbles Everywhere (China Foreign Exchange Reserves)
5. Judgment or Luck (Financial Corporate Profits)
6. Knight in Rusty Armor (Bear Stearns’ share price)
7. The Noose Tightens (3-month Libor)
8. Central Banks, Unbalanced (Northern Rock’s share price)
9. Et tu, Money Markets and Municipals? (European Bond Market Yield Spreads)
10. Giants Fall (Lehman Brothers’ share price)
11. Conclusions and Policy Prescriptions (Total market cap of global stock markets)

It’s fairly dense reading.  Mr. Glibert doesn’t shy away from figures or technical terms, so it’s the kind of book that needs to be gone through slowly, or more than once.  (In my case, I’d need to do both.)  But one point that came out again and again was this:  Almost everyone involved was having too much fun and making too much money — bartenders and bouncers included — to turn up the lights, announce last call, and settle all of the tabs.  But happy hour never lasts forever.

If you’re interested in a better understanding of the kinds of financial cocktails served up over the past few years — and the massive hangover that’s probably just begun — then check out Complicit.

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One piece of advice he gives to people who’ve dug themselves into a deep hole is to sell off a lot of the stuff that got them into the hole in the first place using yard sales, Craigslist, eBay, whatever — especially if it’s gotten so bad that the mortgage payments are behind.  Some of the big things may have to go, like “the flat-screen TV, boat, or Harley.”  Depending on how imminent the consequences are, some really tough decisions may need to be made.

But taking a different spin on this, it could also work to sell a lot of little stuff — whether it be shoes, DVDs, Hummel figurines, books, salt and pepper shakers, comic books, whatever.  Stuff that might have brought some pleasure at one time, but now just takes up space.  Or maybe it still brings pleasure, but needs to go to because bills are due.  A nice collection of DVDs can be sold as a lot on eBay for a few hundred dollars (or more).

If the stuff is more of the “now just takes up space” kind, then there’s a nice fringe benefit:  having that stuff gone literally frees up some of your brain power.  We moved recently and I didn’t do as good a job pitching things before I moved.  I got rid of several boxes of books and magazines that weren’t doing anything productive.  (At one point I was going to sell them, but that’s starting to fall through.)  My shoulders felt lighter after doing that, and it was one less thing I had gnawing at me and sapping my mental energy.

Selling stuff is a great way to raise cash to pay off bills and reduce debt.  Some of the prized possessions may (painfully) end up going, but try starting with the low-hanging fruit — stuff that doesn’t really do that much anymore — and enjoy the extra space and extra piece of mind along with the extra cash.

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