Two professional financial planners address the needs of people nearing and entering retirement.
In this debut personal finance book, DiSalvo and Madarasz discuss common financial planning concerns, from portfolio rebalancing to asset distribution, while maintaining a focus on readers’ needs for retirement. The book is aimed at imminent retirees, as opposed to those with decades of saving and investing ahead of them, and it targets its advice accordingly. The authors explain principles of long-term investing and Social Security payments in clear language that’s easy to understand, while also making a compelling case for relying on expert financial assistance. The book does an excellent job of explaining its key concepts, such as the distinction between risk and volatility, and it also ably addresses the psychological challenges of responsible investing; for instance, DiSalvo and Madarasz note that readers must prepare for “the first time in their lives that their investments and their income are tightly intertwined.” They skillfully delineate the difference between targeting a retirement date and planning for the duration of one’s retirement, as well. The book distinguishes itself from others of its type in how it teaches readers how to meet immediate and future financial needs without chiding them for missing out on decades of potential gains. Those who have a solid knowledge of financial planning will find little new information here, but for novices, the book will provide an informative and readable introduction to the fundamentals, as well as supportive guidance on making basic value judgments that underlie the process. The book also includes several worksheets and links to further resources on the authors’ website.
An informative, well-reasoned guide to making smart retirement decisions.Pub Date: April 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5445-0317-2
Page Count: 170
Publisher: Lioncrest Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Categories: PERSONAL FINANCE | BUSINESS | SELF-HELP
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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. 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
Categories: BUSINESS | LEADERSHIP, MANAGEMENT & COMMUNICATION | PSYCHOLOGY
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BOOK REVIEW
“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. 29, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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