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Book Review: Smart and Simple Financial Strategies for Busy People

09 01 06 21 22

-------- A Basic, yet Effective Financial Strategy

Smart and Simple Financial Strategies for Busy People author: Jane Bryant Quinn Few authors dare to tell you exactly how and where to invest your money. Most of the financial press books you find out there discuss at great lengths the pros and cons of every investment vehicle. They provide vast details on theories and strategies. But most fall short of telling you to invest 30% on ABC fund of XYC company and so on. Jane does provides very specific advice for Busy people - people who want to sleep well at night knowing that their nest egg will survive the test of time and grow to provide them comfort in the future. She tells you where you should invest and why. And she doesn't use any magic tricks or little known investment secrets: she tells you about time proven investment vehicles and why they will work. She provides a pre-designed financial plan (with instructions on how to modify it to help you in your particular needs) that will serve you well.

The advice includes the most common and important financial topics:

• Savings and Paying Debt
• Retirement Planning
• Health Insurance, Wills, and other documents.
• Housing and Mortgage
• Insurance.
• College Savings.
  
• Investing.
  

Her strategy includes starting slowly, without too much preparation work before you start taking actions. She wants you to merge into your life the concepts she will be teaching, not to throw everything away and start from scratch. On the book you will find tips on how to organize your current finances and start putting them in order.

Jane advocates the use of automatic investments. She stresses the fact that 10% savings is a good start, but that if you haven't started in your early 20's, you will probably want to be periodically invested a lot more. She also believes in index investing, and in other hands-free types of investments. She also believes in select the best, low-cost alternatives that will leave most of the returns for you and not for the stock brokers.

The last chapters in the book will dwell into details about the diversification and allocation of your investable assets. I was happy to see the concrete examples of the instruments she was recomending and the companies who could provide them. This sections will prove usefully whenether you are purely using index funds, or individual stocks (which she doesn't discusses), or a mixture. Very worth reading, even if it is not an authoritative work on diversification strategies.

With very few exceptions, the book is very accurate. It is also extremely enlightening for those with limited financial experience and knowledge. I would recommend it as the book to read after The Wealthy Barber or the Richest Man in Babylon. (I prefer the former). It takes the personal finance topics from ideas to concrete action items.

Don't look into this book if you want get-rich-schemes or beat-the-market guides.The book is intended for people who don't enjoy dealing with personal finance issues or for people that tend to procrastinate money matters and don't want to be left behind in life. The book isn't for the experienced stock trader. Nor for those obsessed with having the perfect financial plan that will outsmart the average investor. It doesn't explain how to tailor the investments to every particular detail in which your life may be different from everyone else. For these people, the book will serve as a refresher of basic ideas, and maybe provide one or two new ones, but will not change their lives.  At a minimum, the extensive list of references for books and websites can be usefull for all.

Other reviewers:

• Happy Capitalist
• All Things Financial
• Consumerismm Commentary