A practical personal-finance book that stands out in a crowded field.
A debut guide that offers sound advice on how to achieve financial independence.
Mendez, the president of Eclipse Investments and the director of contracts for Fortune 500 company Automatic Data Processing, explains how to take maximum advantage of good corporate pay and benefits. In this account of how he, a corporate “everyman,” achieved financial independence, he covers how to maximize one’s contributions to a 401(k), invest in index funds, contribute to a health savings account, and more. You don’t need to be a corporate executive or entrepreneur to become a millionaire in America, Mendez writes. However, if you want financial security, which eludes even those with good jobs, you must learn to do a number of things, including how to take a “Personal Inventory,” manage your career, create a financial plan, choose the right investments and shield them from taxes, purchase essential insurance, and set up an estate plan to protect your assets. The book covers each of those topics in separate chapters, which often include written exercises and examples from the author’s own experience, as well as tips on how to make better financial decisions and lists of websites with additional information. However, the book doesn’t acknowledge the fact that many American corporations have embraced a winner-take-all culture, resulting in reduced benefits, stagnant wages, and job insecurity. Instead, it focuses in a practical way on the “fantastic benefits and wealth generation opportunities” that are still available to rank-and-file employees, who may share the author’s goal of financial independence by the age of 50. There are many good suggestions in this volume, such as the idea that young workers should put their career and financial goals in writing, including specific dates for reaching them. Think every day about your financial plan, Mendez writes, and once you achieve one milestone, replace it with another. If the author updates the book in the future, he might consider adding a section about keeping one’s financial information secure; in today’s world of mobile banking and online financial transactions, no book on financial literacy is complete without it.
A practical personal-finance book that stands out in a crowded field.Pub Date: May 8, 2014
ISBN: 978-1494296766
Page Count: 248
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 26, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.
A helpful guide to working effectively with people from other cultures.
“The sad truth is that the vast majority of managers who conduct business internationally have little understanding about how culture is impacting their work,” writes Meyer, a professor at INSEAD, an international business school. Yet they face a wider array of work styles than ever before in dealing with clients, suppliers and colleagues from around the world. When is it best to speak or stay quiet? What is the role of the leader in the room? When working with foreign business people, failing to take cultural differences into account can lead to frustration, misunderstanding or worse. Based on research and her experiences teaching cross-cultural behaviors to executive students, the author examines a handful of key areas. Among others, they include communicating (Anglo-Saxons are explicit; Asians communicate implicitly, requiring listeners to read between the lines), developing a sense of trust (Brazilians do it over long lunches), and decision-making (Germans rely on consensus, Americans on one decider). In each area, the author provides a “culture map scale” that positions behaviors in more than 20 countries along a continuum, allowing readers to anticipate the preferences of individuals from a particular country: Do they like direct or indirect negative feedback? Are they rigid or flexible regarding deadlines? Do they favor verbal or written commitments? And so on. Meyer discusses managers who have faced perplexing situations, such as knowledgeable team members who fail to speak up in meetings or Indians who offer a puzzling half-shake, half-nod of the head. Cultural differences—not personality quirks—are the motivating factors behind many behavioral styles. Depending on our cultures, we understand the world in a particular way, find certain arguments persuasive or lacking merit, and consider some ways of making decisions or measuring time natural and others quite strange.
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.Pub Date: May 27, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61039-250-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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