Review of Safe Strategies for Financial Freedom (Hardcover)

I gave it an extra star because at least Van Tharp tries to offer some real investment alternatives; unlike every other fluff-ball financial planning book.

Unfortunately, most of the investments he offers are filled with landmines that have ruined many experienced & educated investors.When he discusses investments, he doesn't talk much about downside risk, except by ending chapters with "do your due diligence".

The passive investment Tharp recommends most often is real estate (with some incredible return claims).And he points to his seminar buddy John Burley as the trainer you should use. I just received a flyer today hyping John's latest Boot Camp, and it costs $6,000. Maybe he's a great teacher, but his brochure has all the traits of a sleazy scammer.

Tharp spends a lot of time telling you how to predict the inflation rate, or whether the U.S. dollar is going up or down. If Tharp, or any of his students could do this - they would easily be trillionaires, but he can't point to any.Throughout the book, I kept wanting to see "Where is the proof?" Just claiming that you have a backtested model is NOT proof, and only a fool would invest based on this (every beginning trader knows this and Tharp claims he's an expert?). Tharp's evidence comes from the other authors. But they are newsletter writers that make a living selling newsletters - not from their trading profits!

Rather than go into many more examples of his vague "successfully redeploying assets", I'll just say that: since Tharp describes himself as The Leader in investment psychology (and coaches the best investors) - I expected real substance. If you buy this book, you are only paying for Van Tharp's Financial Freedom.

I also spent $100 for Tharp's accompaning software thinking that maybe all the 'huge return examples' alluded to in the book was in his "upsell" product. Wrong. You input your financial information and it adds it up and displays a graphic showing your income & expenses each month. But I already knew these numbers - I was the one that input them!! If you click on the discussions it basically repeats vague stuff from the book.



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Review of Getting Off Track: How Government Actions and Interventions Caused, Prolonged, and Worsened the Financial Crisis (Hoover Institution Press Publication) (Hardcover)

Much of the popular media has jumped to conclusions that so called Neoliberal policy, has failed, and Keynesian economics has prevailed. Yet many economists remain skeptical about the popular view of the crisis. John Taylor has provided interesting and compelling evidence that easing of credit by The Federal Reserve in recent years caused the boom that led to the Subprime Crisis. This book is important because the media and some economists have blamed this crisis on laissez faire far too quickly, often without citing any real evidence. Taylor shows how actual inquiry into the facts contradicts so much of what you hear from the popular press. Taylor and the Hoover Institution deserve much credit for publishing a book of this quality so quickly.



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Review of The Road to Wealth, Revised Edition (Hardcover)

The Road to Wealth is the most comprehensive book I have ever seen about describing the details of terms, practices, tax laws, and legal rights for everthing from credit cards, to filing for bankruptcy, to owning annuities, to setting up housekeeping with someone you're not married to, to buying long-term care insurance, to avoiding payment of estate taxes.

The book's list of sections gives you a little flavor of this tremendous scope:

Managing Debt; Financial Intimacy; Home Ownership; Insurance; Paying for College; Retirement Planning; Stocks; Mutual Funds; Bond and Bond Funds; Annuities; and Wills and Trusts.

Ms. Orman has organized the book by putting a brief essay (less than one to about two pages) at the beginning of each section sharing her general views on that subject, then breaks the section into smaller subjects (in Managing Debt, you get different parts of credit cards, student loans, and bankruptcy, for example), and within each smaller section are a series of questions and brief answers.Many of the questions are definitional, and will take you beyond what your dictionary will tell you.

The sections vary a lot in their usefulness.The first one was on credit cards, and was quite well done.But there is almost as much information on filing for personal bankruptcy as there was on credit cards, even though the people who need the latter are only a small percentage of the people who use the former.There is a lot of material, for example, on stocks but it focuses on terms rather than giving you practical advice on how to think about stock investing.It is only two-thirds of the way through the mutual fund section that she points out that indexed funds outperform 85 percent of professional money managers.Most people don't need to know very much about bonds, bond funds, or annuities, yet there's a lot of material on those subjects.

These sections could have used much more conceptual material to explain how to select objectives, and pursue them.

In general, I found the material mostly accurate, and seldom in conflict.Here are the kind of problems that you will find.In two parts of the credit card section, you are told two different ways to cancel a credit card account (one says you must write or it does no good, and the other tells you just to cut the cards up and call the company to cancel).Ms. Orman says a lot of nice things about Registered Investment Advisors without pointing out that it takes no training or education or other qualification to become one.In the section on having your home inspected before buying it, she does not point out that most inspectors are in the pockets of the selling agents and will rarely tell you what the bulk of the problems are.

I compared these sections to the best specialist books I had read on the same subjects, and found that only her section on credit cards was as good as a more specialized book.In all other cases, her material was less well developed, less focused, and less helpful.

I also checked to see where I found new information that I had not known before, and found that less than ten percent of the material was new to me.But I do read a lot more finance books than most people, have been an investor for a long time, am an attorney, and have had experience with many of these subject materials.

I thought that the best use of this book was for people who didn't know where to start, but suspected they needed help.Each section discussed the kinds of professionals and organizations that a person can call on for help, approximately what they do and what they will cost, and how to work with them.I suspect that that's how most people will be using this book 10 years from now.

A good secondary use is as a source of definitions.

When you buy the book, you also get a free e-newsletter through the end of 2002 to bring you updates on this information.Presumably, you will need to buy that after 2002 if you want to stay up-to-date.

For eighteen year olds with little knowledge of personal economics, this will be a five star book that will make an important difference.It will also be valuable for those who have relied on others to handle their finances in the past, and now want or have to take on that task for themselves.The book will also be a good choice for those who want to learn more about at least two of the major subject areas and feel they know little now.Few will find this book to be a primary guide for making financial investments.

If you find one of these subjects to be valuable after reading hte book, I suggest that you seek out a more specialized book to deepen and focus your understanding of that narrow area.

After you finish examining the many financial angles displayed here, I also suggest that you think about how you can simplify your financial life so that it serves your needs without taking more time than you want to spend.

Get the information you need to make good choices where it matters!

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Review of The Woman Behind the New Deal: The Life of Frances Perkins, FDR'S Secretary of Labor and His Moral Conscience [DECKLE EDGE] (Hardcover)

In this age when Presidential cabinet members come and go almost with the frequency of auto salesmen, several generations of politics watchers have grown up pretty much ignorant of the name Frances Perkins.

Her time in the national spotlight was brief --- the 12 years of Franklin Roosevelt's presidency. As FDR's Secretary of Labor she was especially prominent during the years 1933-1940, when domestic concerns were on the front burner and she played a leading role in pushing for such causes as the Social Security Act, wage and hour laws, immigration reform, workplace safety, the right of workers to organize, pensions, welfare and old-age insurance. When World War II erupted, she was less often in the news but still active in matters like pushing for admission of Jewish refugees into the U.S. As the first woman ever to serve in a President's cabinet, she was subject to blatant sexist attitudes and scurrilous rumors not only from know-nothing outsiders but also from her own colleagues in government.

Author Kirstin Downey was perhaps too young to have known anything about Perkins at first-hand, but she has done a thorough job of bringing this determined yet personally complex woman to life for a new audience. She shows how Perkins's complex character was molded by early revolt against her family background and by a conscious strategy of working with "imperfect people" to attain ends she thought important. Downey is sympathetic toward her subject's sly tactic of first studying closely the people she wanted to use, then playing up to them in ways that helped her get things done.

She had a gift for ingratiating herself with people who could help her. She was an early associate of Jane Addams and Al Smith. Sinclair Lewis wanted to marry her, and when Franklin Roosevelt came into her orbit, she played him as a great pianist plays a Steinway, feeding him ideas and plans and usually letting him take credit for carrying them out. Downey calls her FDR's "moral conscience," which seems in hindsight only a very slight exaggeration. Downey's portrait of FDR meshes closely with those drawn by other writers: a cagey operator who gave you the impression of agreeing to your ideas, then went his own often different way.

Frances was not Perkins's real name. She was born Fanny Coralie Perkins in Boston in 1880, but during her college years she changed her first name as a calculated stratagem for getting on in the world. She also shaved two years off her age, a move that came back to haunt her later when critics came howling after her, hatchets in hand. Her zeal for improving the lot of working people was awakened in 1911 when she was an eyewitness to the Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire in New York, in which 146 people died mainly because the company had locked the exit doors they might have used. When governor-elect Roosevelt of New York offered her a post on the State Industrial Commission, it set her course for life and began her long association with the future President.

Downey does not downplay Perkins's shortcomings --- her intense dislike of the press, burning ambition and personal secretiveness. The book also lays bare the scars Perkins earned from her difficult personal life with a husband immobilized for many years by severe mental illness, and a wrenchingly dysfunctional relationship with her only child, Susanna, herself a victim of mental illness. Downey also gives in occasionally to the urge to smother her story in too much detail --- and perhaps in a bow to modern sensibilities, she suggests subliminally that there may have been lesbian tendencies at work in Perkins's close relationships with several women.

Downey may not be a totally unbiased biographer, but her book does give a fully rounded portrait of this complex woman and makes a good case for her relevance in today's world, 44 years after Perkins's death. Women have come a long way over those 44 years in politics and in life in general; THE WOMAN BEHIND THE NEW DEAL gives a vivid idea of what they had to go through to get to where they now are.

--- Reviewed by Robert Finn



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Review of Mentored by a Millionaire: Master Strategies of Super Achievers (Hardcover)

This book is actually two subjects.

The first third of this book explains how the author rose above an early life of failures and mediocrity. The author met a mentor who emphasised respecting other employees, people, and profit sharing. This mentor was a business partner and their company ended up making millions.

The next two thirds of the book is about how to write infomercials since that is what the author does for a living.

The book is a very detailed personal account of his company, events, and infomercials. Some references to the bible.

For me there's not much new here since I've read plenty of motivation and advertising books. But let's say you had a bad start or want to learn about infomercials, this book may be suitable for you.



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Review of Think Twice: Harnessing the Power of Counterintuition (Hardcover)

Over the millennia, our brains have been developed to be the most energy conserving part of our bodies due, in part, that our distant forefathers had to make quick decisions of friend or foe. Therefore, we rarely take time, and energy, to think or rethink things over. If one does not spend a little extra time to think thru your important decisions, you tend to be on "Thin Ice". For example, take another look at the title of the book, did you notice the double entendre ?!

This book is about mistakes and bad decisions of smart people, business executives, doctors, and others. Many of the reasons all these people and professions make bad decisions, in part, is that we all have a similar framework of having the same mental software basics. This can and does lead to false beliefs and bad decisions due to mental traps as the author describes. These default false beliefs that we all have inherited prevent clear thinking. As the author describes throughout the book, "To make good decisions, you frequently must think twice - and that is something our minds would rather not do."

The book is a nice enjoyable read, very clear with the necessary psychology jargon, and has a very nice set of notes to follow-up on if you would like. All in, though short, this book comes highly recommended for any bookshelf on how to make better decisions.


As a side note:I have pointed out in other reviews of other books below that are in the same genre and which are some of my favorites. So if you like this somewhat introductory book, then you may be interested in more hidden traps our minds fall into, or other social influences, I provide the following recommendations:Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (polymath classic),How We Know What Isn't So (very good),Mean Markets and Lizard Brains (Hidden Gem),The Psychology of Judgment & Decision Making (Classic), orPoor Charlie's Almanack (Charlie's Insights). Good reading and enjoy :)




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Review of Think Twice: Harnessing the Power of Counterintuition (Hardcover)

Over the millennia, our brains have been developed to be the most energy conserving part of our bodies due, in part, that our distant forefathers had to make quick decisions of friend or foe. Therefore, we rarely take time, and energy, to think or rethink things over. If one does not spend a little extra time to think thru your important decisions, you tend to be on "Thin Ice". For example, take another look at the title of the book, did you notice the double entendre ?!

This book is about mistakes and bad decisions of smart people, business executives, doctors, and others. Many of the reasons all these people and professions make bad decisions, in part, is that we all have a similar framework of having the same mental software basics. This can and does lead to false beliefs and bad decisions due to mental traps as the author describes. These default false beliefs that we all have inherited prevent clear thinking. As the author describes throughout the book, "To make good decisions, you frequently must think twice - and that is something our minds would rather not do."

The book is a nice enjoyable read, very clear with the necessary psychology jargon, and has a very nice set of notes to follow-up on if you would like. All in, though short, this book comes highly recommended for any bookshelf on how to make better decisions.


As a side note:I have pointed out in other reviews of other books below that are in the same genre and which are some of my favorites. So if you like this somewhat introductory book, then you may be interested in more hidden traps our minds fall into, or other social influences, I provide the following recommendations:Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (polymath classic),How We Know What Isn't So (very good),Mean Markets and Lizard Brains (Hidden Gem),The Psychology of Judgment & Decision Making (Classic), orPoor Charlie's Almanack (Charlie's Insights). Good reading and enjoy :)




Click Here to see more reviews about: Think Twice: Harnessing the Power of Counterintuition (Hardcover)