An informative, well-reasoned guide to making smart retirement decisions.
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
Finance wonks and investment strategists will enjoy this plainspoken tour of index funds and their discontents.
A Financial Times global correspondent delivers a bracing story of how money works—or, depending on your point of view, doesn’t work.
There are two broad categories of investing, characterized incompletely by the terms active and passive. In the first, investment funds are closely managed, while in the second, they’re parked in broad-based accounts that cover the range of the market and earn out by virtue of being balanced. As Wigglesworth’s account opens, Warren Buffett offers a million-dollar bet “that an index fund that simply tracked the US stock market would beat any group of high-flying hedge fund managers.” In the strictest terms, Buffett turned out to be right, though with qualifications. Wigglesworth sets the Buffett wager against the background of a changing Wall Street, where the culture of “prudent men…quietly tending casks of slowly maturing capital,” as one magazine described it in the 1960s, gave way to a rapacious ethos of boundless fortune-seeking. The “lazy” path invented by financiers who translated mutual funds into index funds turns out to be the safer course for most investors, at least in part because the active managers have a tendency to pay themselves handsomely and have no incentives to keep their funds manageable. Yet, as Wigglesworth writes, the hedge fund culture is alive and well: “Wall Street loves success more than modesty,” even if success comes and goes and the tortoise generally beats the hare. Meanwhile, though the index-fund approach ensures that the average investor will profit over time, it’s not without its drawbacks, including, as the author notes, negative effects on corporate governance and accountability. For all that, he concludes, “the index fund is one of the few truly, nearly unambiguously beneficial inventions, a disruptive technology that has already saved investors hundreds of billions of dollars, sums that will undoubtedly reach trillions in years to come.”
Finance wonks and investment strategists will enjoy this plainspoken tour of index funds and their discontents.Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-08768-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Portfolio
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2021
An up-and-down self-help manual that reads less like motivation for readers and more like an extension of the author’s brand.
A new motivational book from the acclaimed rapper.
It’s no surprise that the creator of the hit 2006 song “Hustlin’ ” can sense an opportunity. The idea of rolling out a post-pandemic rule book for those looking to make good on their quarantine dreams is a good one, even if Ross doesn’t quite pull it off. There’s no doubt that the multiplatinum rapper knows how to put words together. By fashioning them into bite-sized chapters devoted to truisms like “Stack Your Paper” or “Bosses Stay Students,” he makes it difficult to poke holes in many of his straightforward arguments. He even delivers some intriguing nuggets—e.g., when he writes about his visit to Kanye West’s mysterious artistic headquarters, Atlanta’s Pinewood Studios, the sprawling property owned by Dan Cathy, the controversial CEO of Chick-fil-A, who has apparently befriended West. “This kept happening during my visit,” said Ross, explaining how West would act and speak erratically. “Kanye would have my attention and he’d be onto something, but then he would lose me.” Interestingly enough, the same can be said for Ross, who makes some moves of his own that are hard to follow. He begins the first chapter with a lovely meditation about buying a John Deere tractor and how mowing his own lawn during the pandemic allowed him to explore his property in a way that he hadn’t yet because he was too busy. Later, he reveals it was essentially product placement and a way of using the book to make another deal. “The way I promoted my John Deere tractor earlier in this book, you might assume they were sponsoring all the landscaping costs at The Promise Land,” he writes. “They’re not yet. But I look forward to doing business with them in the future.”
An up-and-down self-help manual that reads less like motivation for readers and more like an extension of the author’s brand.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-335-52252-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Hanover Square Press
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2021
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