A useful financial-planning book that’s enhanced by the author’s personal experience.
A financial planner offers advice for managing a lifetime of wealth.
In this debut book, Stefanou draws on his work advising clients and his personal experience of helping his immigrant father to manage his finances in his later years. It offers readers a roadmap to investing responsibly, managing tax obligations, and using accumulated wealth for charitable or legacy purposes. The book’s title refers to the wealth of its target audience—people who have accumulated more than $1 million in investable assets, often concentrated in retirement accounts. The book guides readers on how to invest that wealth to preserve and maximize its value, as well as how to spend it responsibly and enjoyably, and pass it down to one’s heirs. Stefanou covers some familiar topics, such as how to balance growth and risk over the lifetime of a portfolio, minimize tax liability through legal means, and manage spending during retirement. The book also dedicates a chapter to the needs of business owners, arguing that they should diversify their investments beyond their own enterprises and recommending exit planning well in advance of retirement for a smooth sale or transition. Other chapters address less concrete aspects of financial planning, such as assessing personal and ethical values, deciding how to get the most enjoyment out of spending one’s available money, and anticipating and mitigating conflicts among heirs. Stefanou also advises readers on how to avoid financial scams and find a capable financial adviser. Each chapter concludes with “SWIM [Stefanou Wealth and Investment Management] Lessons,” combinations of summary and workbook exercises that guide readers through taking action on the topics covered.
The book provides a solid base of information, and it’s enhanced by the many anonymized stories that Stefanou shares from his clients’ adventures in saving, investing, and bequeathing inheritances. For instance, he explains the steps that he took to help a young man with a low salary minimize his income tax exposure. However, what makes the book unique is Stefanou’s inclusion of stories about his father, a Greek immigrant who lived frugally while working low-wage jobs and acquired enough capital to buy a rental property; he ended up with a portfolio worth more than $1 million, while continuing to work long hours into his later years. The author explains that the penny-pinching habits his dad practiced out of necessity were hard to shake when his financial situation was less precarious, and he takes readers through instances when he coached his father into occasionally spending some of his money. For instance, Stefanou encouraged his father to hire a builder to replace his porch, instead of doing it himself. “It was a fear of embracing and utilizing wealth because he felt like he needed permission to spend or else he was squandering money,” the author explains, and it took the combined effort of himself and his sister to help their father to overcome it. Such insights set this book apart from others in the genre. Throughout, Stefanou writes with empathy for his readers while offering advice that will guide them to responsible financial behavior.
A useful financial-planning book that’s enhanced by the author’s personal experience.Pub Date: April 15, 2025
ISBN: 9798891651777
Page Count: 218
Publisher: Streamline Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 10, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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A passionate and accessible guide to humanizing the workplace.
Helbig and Norman present a game plan for making leadership more responsively human.
In this expanded update to The Psychological Safety Playbook: Lead More Powerfully by Being More Human (2023), the authors provide “practical strategies for responding to resistance, sparking change, embodying the change we want to see, and moving forward deliberately,” specifically in a business setting. They suggest ways to encourage what they call “changemakers” through the use of five key “plays” from their playbook: Communicate Courageously, Master the Art of Listening, Manage Your Reactions (“shift from automatic reaction to conscious response to stay better connected to yourself and others”), Embrace Risk and Failure, and Design Inclusive Rituals. The goal is to ensure that organizational cultures promote psychological safety, guided by leaders who “walk the talk” by emphasizing their own humanity at every turn. (“We must be the first to share our own failures with our teams, which will start to make it possible for others to do the same.”) This call for example-setting is sounded throughout the book as Helbig and Norman urge their target audience (leaders and would-be leaders) to go beyond mere instruction and instead embody the qualities they want to see in their subordinates, such as continuous learning, active curiosity, and self-reflection. Each chapter includes a detailed “Recommended Reading” section and text with extensive numbered and bulleted points formatted to make the core concepts more immediately digestible. The authors effectively employ clear and empathetic prose to assure readers that psychological safety is slow to build and quick to break, observing that such safety requires steady attention and delivers outsize payoffs as a result. They refreshingly ground a great deal of the material in psychology and neuroscience, pointing out, for instance, that research has demonstrated that the parasympathetic nervous system responds to honest appreciation, which improves creative thinking. Some wistful readers might consider some of the authors’ suggestions beyond the reach of their own organizations, as when group facilitators are advised to “gently intervene when someone dominates the conversation,” but hope springs eternal.
A passionate and accessible guide to humanizing the workplace.Pub Date: May 19, 2026
ISBN: 9798993550503
Page Count: 170
Publisher: Crazy Idea Press
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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