What is interesting about the book is often our tendencies for excess is partly driven by evolutionary instincts that were great for our species for thousands of years, but is killing some of us today.  Food is the perfect example of this particular situation.  For thousands of years the idea of ‘eat until you want to burst, when you can’ was a good strategy, after all you never knew when the next famine would hit.  Yet today when endless all you can eat buffets, that strategy is literally killing people.  A lot of us lack the sense of enough food to stop that cycle before it gets out of hand.

The same idea applies somewhat to information.  Marketing companies have spend a fortune trying to understand our brains and realized a few interesting facts.  Like today we are drowning in so much information that even the marketing departments of many companies are finding it hard to get their messages into our heads.  So what is the solution?  This is what I liked about each chapter, the author provides a few ideas on knowing when you have hit enough.  With information the obvious one is start on a information diet.  Did you really need to read all those news sites and blogs each day?  Likely not, so can you pare down to a smaller number of sites?  Perhaps one for national information and another for more local content.

While I could easily keep gushing on how much I like this book I will attempt to jump ahead to two other concepts I really enjoyed in the book.  The first is the fact we have a strange culture towards work, it’s like the option of having part-time work is a problem rather than an obvious solution to a lot of people’s lives.  If you can earn a good wage why do you need to work full time?  After all at some point the extra money is likely largely going to taxes and buying excess stuff.  So don’t forget to consider that when you are looking for a job, the best benefit of all just might be working 80% of the time or what ever number works for you.

The other concept I really liked in the book was the discussion about happiness.  In a culture of ‘more, more and more’ even the idea of happiness has turned into a endless quest for more of it.  Yet what is wrong with skipping the endless happiness quest and parking yourself instead at contentment for most of the time.  Really?  Nothing is wrong with that as an ideal.

In fact, if you understand how happiness occurs it damn well makes a lot of sense.  Case in point, your happiness is largely determined from comparing your baseline to you current experience.  Hence if you change your baseline in an attempt to be more happy it often fails in the long term, as what used to make you happy now only makes you content instead.

For example, let’s say you drink red wine and your day to day choice is some homemade wine from a decent kit.  Then you decide to upgrade to drinking a better wine from the store in order to be more happy.  The only problem is after a few weeks of store bought wine your taste buds and your mind have adjusted to that new level.  It’s now no longer bringing the same level of happiness and instead you are merely content and out some more money.  Adaptation is a bitch when it comes to happiness.

So overall, I was very impressed by this book as it helped explained several things that I sort of knew about, but didn’t fully grasp the concept.  I would have to rank this as one of those books you MUST read prior to planning your retirement.  You might just find you can get by with a hell of a lot less spending than you think you need to, once you understand your own level of enough.

While not a great way to introduce this book, it does give you a bit of the theme of what the book covers.  Context after all if everything.  In this case, the author is diagnosis with thyroid cancer just as he was starting to write this book on personal finance.  So combining that with a cross country train trip and you have the blueprint of the book.  Yet while this might come across as confusing, the message of the book is very clear: money isn’t everything.

Money is rather a tool and one we often get messed up over because of our emotion context around it.  We fight over it, hope to get more of it and even wept over it when we lose it.  Yet we don’t do this with your actual hand tools , like your hammer,do you?  Of course not!  So Hill tries to come up with a medical analogy to cover this very same issue and you end up with sections called: The Diagnosis, Treatment Options, Sticking with a Treatment Plan,and Thrive and Survive.

While personally didn’t care much for the medical comparisons I did appreciate the amount of stories Hill uses to get his point across from people he knows or even meets during his train trip.  You need to understand that money won’t make you happy by itself.  It can buy things or experiences that do make you happy for a while, but it won’t work on a long term basis.  Wealth is really a concept that expands past money into other areas of your life and that is what you have to focus on.  You need to look at your health, your relationships and your money and balance those off to find a better life.

Perhaps my favorite quote from the book is:

When you decide to be happy, you take control of your life’s direction, as opposed to waiting for the right object to fall in your path or the right job opportunity to crop up.

In essence, he was saying you can let life happen or plan your life to happen.  For too often we let our lives happen and I have even been guilty of that at times.  So take control of what factors you can influence and stop complaining about your life and make it the best that you can.  It won’t be perfect, but you will likely be more wealthy than before and you might not even not have that much more money.

My only compliant about the book was it seemed to lack a cohesive path for the reader to follow.  It touched on lots of good points and Hill even quote some of the same research I used in my book, Free at 45, but fails to provide a path forward for the reader.

So overall the book covers some good points, but I won’t keep this one as a reference book myself.  Instead find a library copy to enjoy and take what you can from the book.

In my spare time, I tend to read books.  When I don’t have time to actually read a book, I listen to books while I’m cooking or cleaning around the house (I listen at double speed on my i-pod – it took a little while to get used to, but single speed just seems slow now).  My problem is likely the same as most people’s – what books do I read?

This being the holiday season, maybe you have a few days to read right now.  I thought I would tell you what books I enjoyed over the past year, and what books I am looking forward to coming out in the new year.  This is not really a personal-finance post, but some of the books are finance-related, so it loosely falls into the scope of this site.

I’m not really going to provide an in-depth summary of the books, I’m basically just putting some titles forward as books I like, and you might too.

Finance Books:

I actually don’t really read too many of these books anymore.  I read dozens of these books while I was conceiving my personal finance plan a few years ago.  As a personal finance writer, maybe I should read more of this kind of book, but I’ve found that blogs like this one and others tend to inspire me more than books.

1.) Early Retirement Extreme:  Tim wrote a review of this last year.  My wife got me this for Christmas last year (my request).  I agree with Tim’s review and have taken a lot of great information from it.

2.) Liar’s Poker:  This was Michael Lewis’ first book, and other than Moneyball probably my favouitetitle.  It reminded me that I care a lot more about my money than the majority of money managers.

Diet and Exercise Books:

1.) The Primal Blueprint:  If you’re looking to eat healthier, feel better and lose some weight in the New Year, I’d highly suggest reading this book and following it.  My wife and I have been following the essential premise of this book for about 18 months.  My wife has lost about 40 lbs, I have lost about 15 (and we have both maintained this weight-loss easily) in that period.  I would say that we have a much better idea of what food makes us feel better and seems healthier compared to what we were eating before.

2.) The Vegetarian Myth:  Think you’re helping the world by going vegan/vegetarian?  I’d suggest you read this book written by an ex-vegan and perhaps get another viewpoint.  At one point in the past I thought about dropping meat from my diet, mainly to cut back on food costs.  After reading this book and several others about the North American food system I went another way.  Now I buy my meat locally.  I visit the farms and talk to the farmers, I see the area that the animals are raised and what they are being fed.

“Fun” Books:

These are books that I read and think some people might like, some are older and some are new, but I really enjoyed them.

1.) Voyageur by Robert Twigger:  My brother leant me this book earlier in the year.  He is not a reader, and maybe gets through one or two books per year but he was excited about this one.  I read it in a weekend – It is about a guy who has never canoed before, but attempts to follow Mackenzie’s route through the Rocky Mountains on a birch-bark Canoe.

2.) Ender’s Game:  Even if you don’t like fantasy/science fiction (which this book is) I would say that the “base” story of this book is fairly universal.  I have given this book as a present many times to people and have never really had any complaints (and my friends are not polite people).

3.) Beat the Reaper:  I listened to this book on my vacation a couple of weeks ago, it’s an interesting book that kept my attention while sitting beside the pool in the Dominican Republic.  It is a fictional drama ex-hitman turned doctor whose past comes back to bite him (not really sure if that is a genre or not, but that’s where this would fall).

Books I’m looking forward to in the New Year:

1.) A Memory of Light:  This is the last book of 14 of The Wheel of Time – I didn’t start reading these until about 5 years ago, but the series started in 1990 so the ending has been coming for a while.

2.) Sacre Bleu - Christopher Moore:  If you have never read this author, you are missing out.  One of the most consistently funny writers I have come across.

3.) The Wind Through the Keyhole - Stephen King:  I really enjoy Stephen King’s stories.  Sometimes the writing isn’t great, but the ideas in the stories always take me away.  I love the Dark Tower stories, and this is a prequel to that tale.

So, that’s my list of books that I’ve read in the past year or so and think other people might like.  Any books you would suggest?

In some regards I do feel sorry for David, since after his first book became almost a bible to most personal finance geeks (not surprising since it sold over two million copies in Canada), his second was almost doomed to disappoint somewhat because he couldn’t live up to the hype surrounding the book no matter how hard he tried.  I don’t mean to say the book sucked or anything like that, but rather the expectations could easily be set far too high for the book.

I personally somewhat had this issue.  Why?  Well if you have to know the very first person finance book I ever read was The Wealthy Barber.  So like it or not, that book defined a lot of ideas in my head early on in life about saving in general.  So I did try to rein in my enthusiasm for the book, but I didn’t do that great of a job.  It was rather like Christmas when my copy arrived.

David himself manages to echo a lot of standard advice that you have already likely heard: spend less than you earn, be careful with how much credit you use and for the love of God save something!  Hardly earth shattering advice, but David does have a point about repeating it: the advice hasn’t sunk in yet for the majority of people.  Thus this book is aim squarely at the majority of clueless Canadians who rather talk about almost anything else other than their money, despite the fact a large amount of their problems stem from their lack of knowledge about their money.

So while I did enjoy David’s humour and his explanations of everything, I didn’t learn anything new out of the book.  Which is hardly surprising since if you look at the number of book reviews on this site and realize that is only a fraction of what I have read it becomes obvious I’m a personal finance geek from my toes to the tips of my hair that is standing straight up.

In the end I do think this is a great book for the majority of people to read, especially if they feel the topic of money is a dry and boring one.  Yet if you have already read a lot on personal finance you likely won’t learn much, but you will still enjoy the funny parts.

So did you read David’s new book?  If so, did you like it?

While I typically don’t review many money saving tips books I was pleasantly surprised by Jeff’s book as he focus his book on living happily below your means.  The point of saving money isn’t about hardship, but rather getting more of what you  want in life and that message comes through loud and clear in this book.  Also Jeff manages to actually inject a fair bit of humour in the book and also backup some of his findings with a research.

How do you research cheapskates?  Simple, you give them a huge survey to fill out and let them share their tips for your next book.  So while most books compare back to average people, Jeff’s actually has a lot of data on cheapskates which of course makes it more interesting to know where you fall compared to them.  For example a few bits of interesting data include the average cheapskate home is only 1650 square feet well below the US national average of 2300 square feet and 80% of those polled have or plan to pay off their mortgage early.  Suddenly my 1600 square foot house seems just about right compared to others of a similar mindset.

Yet I can’t hold a candle to one cheapskate that Jeff interviewed for the book: she literally got her house for free.  She manged to find someone who had planned to wreck an older home and had it transported to her property and put in a foundation for it.  Total cost $26,500 include remodeling and moving the house.  Yikes now even I feel like I’ve paid too much for my house.

So for me it was nice to actually compare myself to similar people for a change of pace and get an idea that even for the frugal minded we don’t agree.  For example, coupons tended to split people into even thirds: one third didn’t use them at all, one used them all the time and the last third used them sometimes.

I also really enjoyed the chapter on kids which approached parenting using the oxygen mask method, which simply put means look after yourself first so you can then really look after your kids.  You don’t have to give you kids everything in order to love them and raise them right.  In fact, showing them they can’t have everything in life all at once is likely good training for later on in life.

So overall if you can manage to get a copy from your library I would suggest reading this book.  While most of the tips on saving won’t be new to you, you will likely find a few new ideas on how to save your money and get a few laughs while doing it.

The subtitle of the book is “set your own rules, live the life you want and change the world.” Basically Chris is trying to teach people that you don’t have to just live a conventional life of: get some post secondary, get a job you don’t really like and buy crap you really don’t need and save for a distant retirement.

We far too often in life settle for what we want.  We settle for our jobs, what we do with our time, or how much of a difference we can make in the world.  Chris is trying to teach people in this book how to live a different way where you point your compass to your dream life and actually get there.  He also deals with the common issues that are going to come up from doing this: fear of the change, people saying ‘no’ and generally people not understanding how you really do want to change the world.

He also rightly points out that most people really don’t want to ‘do nothing’, but we often actually done something that we love so we don’t understand how ‘work’ can be an enjoyable thing.  Would you ever really get tired of doing something you love to help others?  Likely a lot more slowly than your current job.

In a nut shell it is basically required reading in my mind for anyone wishing to be retired early as the book might change how you view your current goal of early retirement.  I know it did for me.  You see I have always had this idea that once I’m financially independent that I could then write as much as I want.  Now I realize that I’m approaching the problem in the wrong way.  By aiming to be financially independent first I’m basically making the assumption that I can’t make a living writing, which is really what I’m after.  The problem is that is an assumption that I have made.  What if I can making a modest living at writing?  Would I need to be fully  financially independent? No, I could instead aim for being partly financially independent from my investments and the rest from self-employment income.

So overall I enjoyed the book which was fairly short so you can read through it rather quickly, but working some of the ideas through your mind afterwards might take a little bit longer.

So what’s your dream and why are you not doing it?

I will confess here, that my wife found this book and laughed so much while reading it I had to pick it up after she had finished. While the book didn’t provide any earth shattering insights into my own marriage I never the less learned a few new tricks and approaches on how to deal with issues in a more proactive approach.

I personally like the advice on sex…you need to consult your standard negative sloping demand curve. Pardon? In a nut shell, sex always has a cost with it. You don’t pay in cash for it with your spouse, but depending on the amount of energy discussing it, debating it or planning for it. For example, are the kids in bed? Did you have to buy a gift to finally have some? Or do you only get some on a vacation without the kids? So the higher the energy cost associated with sex the less likely you are do it. So to have more sex, you need to make having it easier and reduce the cost. Rather simple when you think about it, so next time you want some more sex with your spouse make it easy to do.

Perhaps the one theme that comes up over and over in the book is you have to communicate with your spouse. Yes, talking to your spouse about your life and keeping them informed can prevent hurt feelings and misunderstandings. I suspect this is why I’m still with my wife after 10 years. We always talk about everything: the funny, the frustrating, and even the ‘I don’t really care about this, but you do, so I will listen.’

So why is a blog about personal finance and happiness talking about marriage? Well in a nut shell if you are married (or even common law) let’s face the facts: your odds of getting a divorce is high and it is expensive as hell to do. Also a lot of your happiness will likely flow from a good relationship with your spouse. In a nut shell: staying married is good for your wallet and your heart if you can make it work and it is a good risk management tactic. I’m not saying all relationships should stay together, but you should give it an honest try.

Overall I do recommend reading Spousonomics as I found it funny and an enjoyable read while managing to teach me a few new tricks.

As social experiment goes this one was definitely on the fringe, but like any experiment there has to be some ground rules.  For example, Mark could barter for things, that he could accept things in any normal context (like dinner at a friend’s house, but not every day).  He would also try to reduce his fossil fuel usage to nothing and try to help others where possible.  That last point is rather critical to Mark’s theory about the experiment.

You see Mark makes the argument that money has left us disconnected from the world around us.  We have little idea of where the products we use come from and the difficulty in making them or the society costs we pay in pollution.  Money also changes the game from cooperation to competition.  People prior to money were just in the habit of helping each other: for example you help me with my harvest and I will help with yours.  Now days we typically expect to be paid for a similar arrangement.  So the heart of Mark’s experiment would do two things: one bring him back into difficulty of having to either make, borrow or trade for everything he needs to live.  The second part would be to try and get into the habit of helping others with no expectation of getting something back.

The second point might not seem all that important until you realize prior to the invention of money our economy worked on the idea of you give support to others and receive support in return.  Typically these daily exchanges weren’t kept track of like money so by giving freely Mark hoped to get back to that concept just a little bit.

Now the majority of the book is the strange tale of how Mark spends his year without money and how it works out.  Overall the entire thing comes together fairly well for him.  He gets a free trailer from someone who does want theirs anymore and sets it up on an organic farm in exchange for working at the farm three days a week, so that was his shelter.  For food he grew some of his own on the land near the farm or he bartered for some, forged for wild food or hit a dumpster or two for perfectly acceptable food that was still in its packaging (just one day past its expiry date).  Then transportation was with a bike and he did buy a small solar panel prior the experiment to charge a cellphone (incoming calls only or 911) and his laptop (so he could write about his experience on his blog or email others).

Overall the book was an entertaining read and it reminded me of a fact a lot of people forget: there is no one right way to live.  While Mark’s lifestyle would be a completely not for you, it doesn’t invalidate that it might work for him or others.  What’s struck me as interesting about the experiment was basically a large part of it was based on the fact of using what other didn’t want anymore.  We waste so much as a society that in moderate climates, like England, it is possible to live off that waste stream.  Obviously it can’t work for anyone since you need a certain amount of waste to sustain those that choose this way to live that way, but if it turns your crank have fun.

If nothing else I enjoyed reading this book as a reminder.  We often talk about needing so much money to hit early retirement, but the fact is if you just want out of the system you don’t even need a dime to do that (depending on where you live).  It may not be for you, but it is an interesting reminder of you can get buy on less than you think.

So would you ever try something like this?  Or at what point in your life did you live on the lowest amount of money?  I personally recall right after university and prior to my first career job, my wife and I both made about $6 or $7/hour and we managed to do fairly good.  We were broke, but happy.

Impressive, but how does that help you?  Well in this short book, a mere 134 pages, Gary outlines how to utilize your natural talent and passion in order to grow just about any business or even a blog.  So regardless of what you are doing selling an actual product or just blogging about what you love he provides a clear cut method to get the most of your social media networks.  Including a few tips that I found myself taking notes on since while I like social media I suck at using it (just look at my twitter feed if you don’t believe me).

While some of the advice in the book might strike anyone who has been around the internet as obvious, for example, that social media has dwarfed some other traditional media methods to reach people.  He is still honest about running a business is a lot of work.  My favorite quote in the book is:

Many are probably just sick of the killer hours and inflexible schedules and demanding bosses often found in the corporate world and think entrepreneurship will somehow be less taxing.  I hate to disappoint, but if you’re looking for an easier time here, you’re barking up the wrong tree.

So should you read the book?  Well to be honest it really isn’t for everyone, especially if your business has little to no internet exposure. Yet if you do have a Twitter and Facebook account it might be worth reading to get a few ideas on how to use both of them more effectively.

PS: I want to thank Frank Wiginton for bringing this book to my attention a while back with one of his comments.

To start I should give a few disclaimers on this book: first it is really short to read ( just over 20 pages) and second Frank is a certified financial planner so yes there is a little sales pitch for his services at the back of the book.

So you might wonder why do a book review on such a short book?  Well in a nutshell I’ve always liked Frank’s comments on this site and I actually found the book useful since it answers a rather basic question: what is a financial plan?

The book starts out answer that question by defining what financial planning is not.  I agree with Frank that often an investment plan is often passed off as financial planning when that is only one small part of it.  What should a financial plan be then?  Basically a comprehensive look at where you want to go and then how to get there.

It’s not an easy thing to pull together if you end up looking at the pieces involved such as your estate,  insurance coverage, spending levels, investments, taxes paid and any businesses you own.  So in case your not familiar with how that works Frank then outlines the typical process of pulling together the full blown financial plan and an estimate of the time involved.

I liked this book since it really did get me thinking about my own situation and a few blind spots that I have yet to fill in for my plan.  For example, I’ve been so fixated at finishing my book I actually never considered the tax implications of the book doing anything other than breaking even. If I suddenly do well with it, then what? So if nothing else this short book is useful for the questions Frank points out that might get you thinking about what you are missing in your plan.

Also the price is right since the ebook is can be downloaded for free from here.  Perhaps the only downside I can give the ebook is I really wish it was a little longer and perhaps gave a few more stories of how financial planning has helped people.  I’m a sucker for a good story and I personally though the book would be a lot better with a few stories.

So do you have a financial plan?  If so, how long have you used it and do you think it is worth it?  If you don’t have a financial plan, just how were you planning to retire early anyway? *grin*