Category: Personal Finance

I just finished reading 48 Days to the Work You Love by Dan Miller. I found this book to be generally helpful and easy to read, but it doesn’t offer anything groundbreaking or terribly enlightening either. I thought it had a lot in common with What Color is Your Parachute, though I found 48 Days to be much more readable and less boring (maybe it’s just me, but I didn’t care for What Color is Your Parachute at all).

48 Days to the Work You Love will likely help you find inspiration, motivation, and just may spark a few ideas. However, there isn’t much ‘meat’ to the book. It only glosses over these topics at a high level and leaves you still to do the work of figuring out the details and coming up with a plan for finding new work or making money on the side. It offers nothing that you can’t find on hundreds of websites for free, but if you want to spend some money on this book you’ll have it packaged into an easy-to-read, paper format.

If you think that earning an hourly wage, working for someone else is the only way to make a living, you can certainly benefit from reading this book. If you already know that isn’t your only option, and/or you are already earning money on the side, you probably won’t find anything new here. I’d say it’s worth reading if you think you need some help finding a new direction with your work and income. If you already have that part figured out, there isn’t anything else for you here.

To follow-up yesterday’s post, here is another excellent book that I came across while cleaning out my book collection yesterday. The Top 10 Distinctions Between Millionaires and the Middle Class by Keith Cameron Smith.

This is another short, excellent book that covers the basics that need to be understood to become wealthy. Don’t read too much into the title though, the focus isn’t about becoming a ‘rich millionaire’ rather solid advice that anyone can follow to become wealthy an successful.

Much like The Richest Man in Babylon, this book is packed with great information and keeps the advice short and sweet. It’s only 112 pages long (small pages at that), so you should probably set aside a couple of hours to read it all at once. However, the key with this book isn’t to just take in the information and move along. I highly recommend looking at each of the 10 sections and taking the time to review and work on the areas that need improvement in your life.

Read this book if you want some great motivation and an outline for financial success.

I just finished reading Common Sense Economics: What Everyone Should Know About Wealth and Prosperity. This book is an introduction to the key fundamentals of Economics, as well as a bit of Personal Finance. It’s a relatively small book too, one you can easily read in a day.

Common Sense Economics is a great book to read if you are new to Economics, haven’t studied Economics for a long time, or if you are currently clueless about your money and/or the Economy.

This book is divided into three parts. The first two deal with Economics and Government. The last part deals with Personal Finance. The inclusion of the Personal Finance part can either make this book the perfect fit for you or it may leave you wanting more. If your personal financial life is already under control, you won’t gain anything from this third part. If you have yet to take control of that part of your life, this chapter provides you an excellent outline for how to get started.

Some highlights from the book:

The reality of life on our planet is that productive resources are limited, while the human desire for goods and services is virtually unlimited. Because there is “no free lunch,” we must sacrifice something we value in order to get something else.

Politicians often speak of “free education,” “free medical care,” or “free housing.” This terminology is deceptive. These things are not free. Scarce resources are required to produce each of them. Governments may be able to shift costs, but they cannot avoid them.

Nearly all choices are made at the margin. That means that they almost always involve additions to, or subtractions from, current conditions, rather than “all-or-nothing” decisions. The word “additional” is a substitute for “marginal.” We don’t make “all-or-nothing” decisions, such as choosing between eating or wearing clothes—dining in the nude so that we can afford food.

The foundation of trade is mutual gain. The motivation for trade is summed up in the statement: “If you do something good for me, I will do something good for you.” Trade is productive because it permits each of the trading partners to get more of what he or she wants.

An increase in government transfers will reduce the incentive of both the taxpayer-donor and the transfer recipient to earn income. Economic growth will thereby be retarded.

Competition for transfers will erode most of the long-term gain of the intended beneficiaries.

Programs that protect potential recipients against adversity arising from their imprudent decisions encourage them to make choices that increase the likelihood of the adversity.

Providing others with goods and services that are highly valued compared to their cost is the key to financial success.

I really enjoyed this book and highly recommend it. I borrowed it from the library, but I intend to purchase my own copy soon. Both for future reference and so I can loan it to friends. It makes for a great Economics primer and the section on Governments’ role in Economics is excellent…and quite timely given the current insanity in our nation’s bailout-addicted political climate.

I recently discovered the Bonfire of the Brands website and book, thanks to the Good Consumer video I talked about a few days ago.

I really love the idea behind this site and I ordered the book. Below are a few excellent quotes (my titles in bold) from the website. I recommend taking more time to read it yourself—there is a lot of great content to be found.

The Basic Problem:

These are the facts: Chain stores dominate our high streets. Adverts dominate our media. And brands dominate our culture – to the extent that owning the right products defines what it is to be normal. For some people this isn’t an issue – they shop for pleasure, they love the big brands, and they feel comfortable being sold to all day. I’m not one of those people. Well, not anymore. I’ll give you three reasons why:

1. Non-essential consumption is a root cause of the situation we find ourselves in today – the environment, the economy and popular culture are all affected by the drive towards consumer growth.

2. Consumerism doesn’t work – in that it’s supposed to make us happy. Not in any sustainable way. Shopping is like a drug – the instant high is fantastic, but it’s never enough.

3. We’re starting to lose the choice. There are millions of consumer choices on the shelves. But alternatives to consumerism isn’t one of them. It’s virtually impossible to live brand-free and be normal.

Consumerism:

Buy Less Live More

If we don’t shift to a less consumerist and throwaway society, we’ll hit crisis after crisis, and it’s coming soon.

Think about it:

The Mark Of A Moron

It’s surely the mark of an individual to refuse to be branded. It’s daft to spend money on Nike clothes. The mark of a moron. Anyone who does so has been merely duped by the million-dollar marketing campaigns. To buy Nike shows a sheep-like nature and a lack of imagination and style.

Who in their right mind would want to be branded, like a cow? A brand identifies you as someone else’s property. It is the mark of a tamed and exploited animal. Brands promise freedom but they deliver the opposite: the worst kind of slavish conformity.