Review of How to Be the Family CFO (Hardcover)

First, we have to weed out the extraneous parts of the book: a pointless quote on most pages surrounded by a lot of empty white space, unnecessary stories from Kim's personal life that do not add any value, insightless chapters just so that a topic is mentioned (such as insurance and identity theft), loads of totally-pointless statistics, several fluff-ball psychology chapters, frequent reaching to mention some sophisticated academic research but then it is never translated into how specifically to put it to use, and lastly, and unethically, promotes her several thousand dollar seminar in obvious and subtle ways throughout the book. [I find it fraudulent when I am paying for content but only presented with empty or biased information to promote their more expensive products.]

Now that the useless parts are pulled away, is there anything left? Yes, if you've never been exposed to any basic financial planning material, because this is just more of the basic stuff that you'll find anywhere. Whether you have or not, there is still a big problem with Kim's book: who is your audience? There is quite a chasm on how she approached writing the book - do you offer broad strokes or loads of tiny details. Kim seems to have chosen randomly between them; as an example, she offers a several minute details for estate planning but she is not a licensed attorney so who knows how up-to-date or appropriate this information is; and she doesn't offer the overall view aside from a few questions to be sure to ask (based on what?). Like many sections of the book, you would be far better off with a book specifically written by an expert in that area or a general view of personal finance that touches on estate planning that includes where to get more detailed information.

The area of Kim's alleged expertise is investing. Here is the summary of what she says about investing in this book: money managers and funds never beat the indexes (in aggregate), so do your own investing by yourself and focus on generating income - and, by the way, my method on generating income is really good. I am acquainted with Kim's investing method only because I know two of her students. They stopped using her method when their portfolios were obliterated between the Summer of 2007 and Summer of 2008. I have no idea how representative these results were, but I know they paid her $4,000 to learn how to make Kim's huge return claims but they were left with decimated retirement accounts.

Regardless of their results with her method, Kim's book does not stand on its own and I couldn't possibly recommend it to anyone interested in personal finance. There are any number of books 10 times better than this one such as "What's Your Net Worth" by Jennifer Openshaw, or "Get Your Assets in Gear" by Jan Dahlin. If you want really simply info. get a basic book by Suze Ormand.




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