WILLIAM E. DONOGHUE'S GUIDE TO FINDING MONEY TO INVEST

With the economic recovery/expansion apparently slowing down, the author of William E. Donoghue's Complete Money Market Guide (1981) and William E. Donoghue's No-Load Mutual Fund Guide (1983) has repackaged and updated material from the two. The unfortunate result is a. personal finance manual that lacks both the scope of wider-angle guides (e.g., Grace Weinstein's The Lifetime Book of Money Management) and the fresh insights of previous Donoghue efforts. As per the title's promise, the focus is on unearthing ""hidden"" assets, which can be freed up for investment. Donovan coyly suggests reducing ""the thighs of your tax bill with accounting aerobics"" (by adjusting withholding deductions to zero-refund levels, for example), opting out of low-yielding passbook savings accounts, avoiding mutual funds with front-end loads (i.e., commissions), selling off unproductive resources (coin or stamp collections perhaps), and slashing household expenses. While most of the proposals are unexceptionable and even obvious, a few go right to the limit: Donoghue strongly implies, for instance, that he'll be deducting part of his cable TV bill on his federal tax return on the grounds that Moneyline and other financial shows are important to his business. Past the chapters on do-it-yourself budgeting and cash management (the bulk of the book), Donoghue turns his attention to wealth building--where, apart from a few refinements to allow for bank deregulation and accommodate tax-exempt investments, the system, dubbed Super-SLYC (for safety, liquidity, yield and catastrophe-proofing), remains about the same. In short, it involves monitoring interest rates as revealed by (surprised Donoghue's 30-Day Money Fund Average. As rates trend downward, the attraction of stocks increases; if the cost of money is on the rise, equities hold less appeal. Equilibrium occurs in the 11-12 percent range, meaning portfolios should be divided 50/50 between stock and money-market funds. Old material and pedestrian advisories, puffed up with self-promotion.