An informative entry-level guide to building good financial habits.
A back-to-basics introduction to financial responsibility.
In this debut personal finance book, Wieher, a nonfiction author and educator, takes readers through 10 lessons he wishes he had learned earlier, covering topics from budgeting to acquiring life insurance. The author explains why starting to invest at a young age is important, how compounding interest charges can make credit card purchases many times more expensive than their face value, and why life insurance is an important part of a growing family’s financial plan. Wieher uses some of his own financial decisions, like financing a high-end car and using a 30-year mortgage to buy a house, as examples of what he encourages readers to avoid while holding up other habits, like making regular transfers to retirement accounts and earning money through freelance work, as ones to emulate. Wieher writes with a chatty, conversational tone (“I mean, do what you want, but I’m telling you, millionaires don’t lease”) and makes the book’s information easy to follow and understand. The material is intended for readers with little to no background in the basics of personal finance, and the author approaches concepts like budgeting, credit card usage, and car payments at an introductory level. For its intended audience of financial novices who may never have been told why saving for short-term goals and for retirement is important, or those who are not cognizant of the hazards of carrying a credit card balance, the book provides an excellent introduction free from judgment and condescension. Readers who are already familiar with the fundamentals may find that the book doesn’t go far enough in explaining how to develop a budget and make necessary tradeoffs, develop a balanced investment portfolio, or evaluate a loan offer. The work could have been strengthened by acknowledging the structural economic issues that contribute to the financial shortcomings of many Americans, but as a primer for responsible individual financial behavior, the book is a solid resource.
An informative entry-level guide to building good financial habits.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9798218664046
Page Count: 124
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 23, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
More uncommonly sensible investment guidance from a master of the game. Drawing on his experience at Fidelity's Magellan Fund, a high- profile vehicle he quit at age 46 in 1990 after a spectacularly successful 13-year tenure as managing director, Lynch (One Up on Wall Street, 1988) makes a strong case for common stocks over bonds, CDs, or other forms of debt. In breezy, anecdotal fashion, the author also encourages individuals to go it alone in the market rather than to bank on money managers whose performance seldom justifies their generous compensation. With the caveat that there's as much art as science to picking issues with upside potential, Lynch commends legwork and observation. ``Spending more time at the mall,'' he argues, invariably is a better way to unearth appreciation candidates than relying on technical, timing, or other costly divining services prized by professionals. The author provides detailed briefings on how he researches industries, special situations, and mutual funds. Particularly instructive are his candid discussions of where he went wrong as well as right in his search for undervalued securities. Throughout the genial text, Lynch offers wry, on-target advisories under the rubric of ``Peter's Principles.'' Commenting on the profits that have accrued to those acquiring shares in enterprises privatized by the British government, he notes: ``Whatever the Queen is selling, buy it.'' In praise of corporate parsimony, the author suggests that, ``all else being equal, invest in the company with the fewest photos in the annual report.'' Another bull's-eye for a consummate pro, with appeal for market veterans and rookies alike. (Charts and tabular material— not seen.)
Pub Date: March 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-671-75915-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1993
Sure to generate debate, and of special interest to adherents of free market capitalism.
A book-length assertion that capitalism’s woes can be traced to government interventionism.
Sharma, an investments manager, financial journalist, and author of The 10 Rules of Successful Nations, The Rise and Fall of Nations, and other books, opens with the case of his native India. The author argues that it should be in a better position in the global marketplace, possessing an entrepreneurial culture and endless human capital. The culprit was “India’s lingering attachment to a state that overpromises and under-delivers,” one that privileged social welfare over infrastructure development. Much the same is true in the U.S., where today “President Joe Biden is promising to fix the crises of capitalism by enlarging a government that never shrank.” Refreshingly, Sharma places just as much blame on Ronald Reagan for the swollen state that introduced distortions into the market. Moreover, “flaws that economists blame on ‘market failures,’ including wealth inequality and inordinate corporate power, often flow more from government excesses.” One distortion is the government’s bloated debt, as it continues to fund itself by borrowing in order to pay for “the perennial deficit.” As any household budget manager would tell you, debt is ultimately unsustainable. Wealth concentration is another outcome of government tinkering that has, whether by design or not, concentrated wealth into the hands of a very small number of people, “a critical symptom of capitalism gone wrong, both inefficient and grossly unfair.” Perhaps surprisingly, Sharma notes that in quasi-socialist economies such as the Scandinavian nations, such interventions are fewer and shallower, while autocratic command economies are doomed to fail. “[T]oday every large developed country is a full-fledged democracy,” he writes, and the more freedom the better—but that freedom, he argues, is undermined by the U.S. government, which has accrued “the widest budget deficit in the developed world.”
Sure to generate debate, and of special interest to adherents of free market capitalism.Pub Date: June 11, 2024
ISBN: 9781668008263
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024
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