Comments on: The Simple Dollar Weekly Roundup: Book Club Reboot Edition

By: Eric

Eric — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 20:53:00 +0000

I’m late on this and it’s probably not news to most anymore, but congrats to Trent for winning both the reader’s choice and editor’s choice 2007 Performancing Blog Award for Best Business/Money blog in 2007!!

By: Eric

Eric — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 13:28:11 +0000

I bought the book to read but never got started. I really like the book club idea and I do encourage you to continue in another series.

By: Caeli

Caeli — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 20:24:22 +0000

I’m really sad that you aren’t continuing with this book. I don’t have time to get to the library and I’m too broke to buy the book, so I was following along and trying to get as much as I could out of the summary. Oh well. I’ll just have to make time to get to the library.

By: alison

alison — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 15:48:18 +0000

I appreciated the choice this month – I never would have started the book without you to motivate me and have found it to be practical and illuminating. Thank you.

By: Rachel

Rachel — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 13:45:28 +0000

I never read the book reviews. I just don’t like them. If I want to read a book, I will. I don’t want to read cliffnotes.

By: tarits

tarits — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 22:31:32 +0000

hmm… yup, this book really gives me food for thought.

it’s okay with me if you continue with this book for the club, okay too if you choose another one

By: Elaine

Elaine — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 20:47:50 +0000

sweeeeet.

By: plonkee

plonkee — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 19:53:26 +0000

@Elaine:
My inner maths geek says it’s undefined – there is no proper way of doing it. Informally, you could describe it as infinite.

By: turbogeek

turbogeek — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 19:52:23 +0000

@Saving Freak — Agreed. Assuming we are in a long-term ascending energy cost market is pretty smart. I think I’ll follow your Dad’s lead. (Note that while our gas prices are up to ~$3/gal, the EU is around $4/gal; I would expect us to continue to drift upward until we reach equilibrium with them.)

@Trent — You got my vote, too. Great site.

@J.D. — I like that book as well. I’d also like any of the books by Dave Ramsey. Both are ‘just extreme enough to generate discussion, but not so extreme as to alienate people’.

@Elaine — Excellent job! My net worth is up 17% in the last year, but progress slows the higher up the mountain you go. I’m getting close to the zone in which my net worth increase due to investments will exceed my income from my primary job… that will make it tougher to keep driving to work every day.

@Rick — I’ll buy that math. It’s a good enough metric for those ‘crossing the zero line’.

By: Rick

Rick — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 18:31:21 +0000

Elaine: this doesn’t make too much sense, but this is the way I did it when my networth was negative. I just did the calculations based on absolute values. So in your case, I would do:

(12000-(-9000))/abs(-9000)
= 21000/9000
= 233% increase.

Yeah, it doesn’t make too much sense, but it’s the best you can do.

By: Chad

Chad — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 18:12:31 +0000

I agree with Dariaclone, holidays was not the best to start.

But when I bought the book and decided to read along I realized that those indepth soul searches that the book wanted were going to take more than a week or two. Especially if I really wanted to get into it.

Plus in the past I didn’t have to completely read it to be able to post a comment or two while this book was more of a tutorial book so you had to do the exercises to have a conversation about it.

By: Chris Conley

Chris Conley — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 17:57:17 +0000

got my vote!

By: Elaine

Elaine — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 17:44:09 +0000

pfft, only 171%? I increased mine by 788% in the last three months :P

Though to be fair, three months ago my net worth was roughly zero. heh heh.

On a serious note though, math isn’t my strong point so how does one calculate percentage increases when going from negative to positive? In the past year my net worth has gone from about -9000 to almost $12k now. Not that it matters to me a lot, I’m just kind of curious.

By: daily walrus

daily walrus — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 16:30:46 +0000

Good idea to cut your losses with this one. Even though I didn’t read the book last time, I followed along with the book club posts. This time I really had no interest. Looks like you learned something from “The Dip”.

By: J.D.

J.D. — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 15:53:16 +0000

I’ve got a great idea for a book that I think will fire some people up for discussion. Rich Dad, Poor Dad? :)

By: Trent

Trent — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 15:38:47 +0000

I’ve got a great idea for a book that I think will fire some people up for discussion. Good idea on the questions, though.

By: Dariaclone

Dariaclone — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 15:34:48 +0000

Or that should be new book in the book club.

By: Dariaclone

Dariaclone — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 15:26:16 +0000

A couple of book club suggestions. First, a few of us suggested that the holidays was not the best time to start a book club, so you no doubt lost some participation that way.

Second, as moderator I would suggest setting up questions so that even people who don’t read the book can participate. Rather than just a summary, I would propose you ask questions at the end: Does your current job meet these expectation? Do you agree with the petals on the flower? Which of these do you think is most negotiable? Least negotiable? Etc. As the post was written there didn’t seem to be much to contribute–either for someone who read the book (and didn’t need the summary) or someone who didn’t (but didn’t see an opening for participation).

By: Jason

Jason — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 15:11:37 +0000

Good luck with the Reader’s Choice award…you’ve got my vote! I agree with you on the book. All the “parachute” books are rather introspective and it is hard to get fired up to comment one way or the other.

By: The Saving Freak

The Saving Freak — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 14:58:08 +0000

My father started investing heavily in natural resources when oil prices first started rising. His reasoning was that China and India were going to use more and more resources making the price go up dramatically. So far he has been right on the money.