Every Sunday, The Simple Dollar reviews a personal finance or other book of interest. Also available is a complete list of the hundreds of book reviews that have appeared on The Simple Dollar over the years.

The vast majority of retirement books I’ve read focus on maximizing every dollar to actually arrive at retirement. They don’t look at the period of retirement itself.

The relative freedom from time constraints that retirement offers opens the door to a lot of things that would otherwise be impossible, and this is where How to Retire Happy, Wild, and Free by Ernie Zelinski comes in. Rather than looking strictly at retirement savings as part of one’s plan for retirement, Zelinski looks deeply at the personal choices made in retirement as part of that plan.

It’s an interesting and fresh perspective on retirement, and Zelinski’s breezy and friendly tone certainly helps push it along.

Thank Heaven for Retirement!
If you do not plan for an active retirement, you’re setting yourself up for a difficult and expensive retirement. If you work until late in life under the pretense that you’re setting yourself up on easy street due to your big pile of savings, you’re going to find that you don’t have a lot of years to enjoy it. Instead, a much better path is to live relatively lean, work toward an early retirement, and plan for a retirement life that’s active and full of adventure.

Retirement: A Time to Become Much More Than You Have Ever Been
A good retirement doesn’t involve sitting around and doing nothing all day. It means applying yourself to something that you’ve always wanted to apply yourself towards but never felt that you could due to the need to have an income-producing job. If this new activity produces income, great! If it doesn’t, it’s still filling your hours with lots of contentment and enjoyment of life, and not filling those hours with idleness or expensive activities.

So Many Worlds, So Much to Do!
Zelinski makes a challenging suggestion for anyone who’s retired. On the first day of retirement, unplug your television set and unsubscribe from cable. This will force you to be more active, which will improve your health. It will also push you to actually take on the big dreams you have rather than putting them off until tomorrow because there’s something good on television.

Take Special Care of Yourself – Because No One Else Will
Some degree of physical activity is an essential part of a healthy retirement. Zelinski recommends a daily walk at a minimum – and preferably more than that. Long walks, bicycle rides, and other activity should be part of your life every single day. This will not only improve your quality of life, but the length of your life as well. If you allow yourself to be sedentary, you’ll gain weight and lose the energy you need to live an active and vibrant life. A walk through your neighborhood or through nature is also a free form of entertainment, something that can’t be said for many other forms of entertainment.

Learning Is for Life
Much like physical activity keeps your body healthy, mental activity keeps your mind healthy. Zelinski recommends a commitment to lifelong learning in which you strive to learn something significant each day. One way to do this is to take a college course in a topic that’s interested you at your local community or public college. As an aside, I had a friend whose grandfather was in college at the same time as him. The grandfather actually wound up being in an assigned project group that I was in and my interactions with him were some of the best experiences of my college years. Going back to college does not mean you’ll be out of place.

Your Wealth Is Where Your Friends Are
A good, reliable friend is something invaluable to have, but you can’t build friendships by sitting at home alone. Seek out community activities related to things you’re interested in, or just get involved with a volunteer activity. Doing these things will essentially force you to meet like-minded people, and there are few better situations from which to build a friendship. A friend is a person who will be there for you when you need them and bring joy into your life when you don’t need them as much, and that’s an invaluable thing to have.

Travel for Fun, Adventure, and More
Retirement travel can actually be really inexpensive since you’re not tied to the traditional idea of the “tourist season.” You can travel to locations on your own schedule, not those of school calendars or professional guidelines. You can also travel like a migrant, meaning you can move slowly, scoop up deals as you go, and do things at your own schedule. This makes it easy to travel almost anywhere surprisingly cheap.

Relocate to Where Retirement Living Is Best
In my opinion, Zelinski’s best single piece of advice comes in this chapter: move to a college town. A large college offers tons of cultural opportunities, speeches, performances, groups, and countless other things to get involved in, most of them for free. The college town that I once lived in was a vibrant place with a lot of older people involved in the college community. You couldn’t go to an event without a lot of older people there, which made it interesting both for me and for them.

Happiness Doesn’t Care How You Get There
Don’t leave this world with songs unsung that you wished you had time to sing. The last thing you want to have in your final years are regrets of things that you could have easily done. Your retirement years are often the time to do those things. Most of the things that people wished they could have done are things that require time, and time is what you have in spades in retirement. Use it.

Is How to Retire Happy, Wild, and Free Worth Reading?
Rather than approaching retirement as merely a savings goal, How to Retire Happy, Wild, and Free looks at retirement as a period to capitalize not so much on the money you’ve saved, but the asset of time.

In other words, saving for retirement isn’t about saving money. It’s really about saving time. The more you put away for retirement, the more time you give yourself to accomplish all of the things you dream about accomplishing, whether it’s writing a novel or learning a musical instrument or camping in every national park.

It’s a great perspective and a useful one, and Zelinski writes about it with an irreverent and breezy tone that makes this a fun book to read, too. This one’s highly recommended to anyone within ten years or so of their retirement, on either side.

Check out additional reviews and notes of How to Retire Happy, Wild, and Free on Amazon.com.

Every Sunday, The Simple Dollar reviews a personal finance or other book of interest. Also available is a complete list of the hundreds of book reviews that have appeared on The Simple Dollar over the years.

One of the first books I reviewed on The Simple Dollar was Dave Ramsey’s More Than Enough. I found it to be an interesting take on personal finance, as it ties together personal finance and character and personal growth into a single package. While I didn’t think that it was the first book you should read if you were in personal finance panic mode, I did recommend it as a worthwhile read.

A few weeks ago, a reader emailed me and suggested that I read what my reader described as a “companion” to More Than Enough, entitled How to Have More Than Enough. My reader suggested that it was a much better read than the first book.

Store Manager, to Aisle One, Please!
Many people feel unhappy with big aspects of their life, but they also find change to be stressful. The key thing to remember about any change that you take on in your life is that the end goal of it is to put you in a place where you are no longer unhappy with some aspect of your life. For example, choosing to live a life that involves less spending can be really stressful, but the end goal of it is actually a stress-reducer: freedom from debt and financial worry.

Foundation Failure
Why do people get into situations where they’re unhappy with some aspect of their life? Ramsey’s argument is that some basic foundation of their life has failed in some fashion. Ramsey argues that most lives are held up by a series of posts, and when one or more of those posts begin to rot and fall away, the entire structure of our lives begins to fall apart. Thus, the best thing we can do is to constantly shore up those things that we rely on. This chapter focuses a lot on values – the immediate things that we hold true and hold dear in our lives. What are we doing to reinforce those things? Most of the rest of the book focuses on nine more of these “poles” that hold up everyone’s life.

Vision – Binoculars Looking at Your Future
Vision refers to knowing where you want to go in life. This ranges from something as simple as what you want to accomplish this week to what you hope to accomplish over your entire life. If you focus on nothing but today, you’re going to walk in a rut in your life and never get to any of the places you’d like to go someday. The big key is to just start thinking about it and writing it down. What would you like to have people say about you at your funeral? What has your life meant? What can you do to get there?

Unity – A Tangled Rope Is Just Loops
Unity simply means doing things with respect to the people around you. So often, it’s easy to just do what we want and ignore what others need or want. However, if you focus on listening to the needs of others and incorporating those needs into your daily actions and choices, you’re going to find that your entire life flows much better. This goes from things like cleaning out the dishwasher to big things like how to spend a big windfall. The more you listen to the key people in your life and involve them in your major decisions, the easier your life will flow and the more they’ll involve you.

Hope – Fuel for the Explosion!
Is the future awash with possibilities or is it something to dread? If you look at the future as something to avoid and to fear, then you’ll find that your future is indeed a darker place. A much better approach is to look at one’s future as a place for hope and optimism, where the things you want in life are destined to happen. A key part of this equation is to look for the good “what-if”s and chart a path to them, and also look for paths away from the bad “what-if”s.

People Who Need People – Support and Accountability
You need other people in your life. For many people, though, it’s a surprise to learn that others need them in their lives. There are people out there who need you to be at your best. At the same time, those people are often the ones who can be there for you when you need help. It’s a two way street of support and accountability that can constantly push you on to better things if you let it happen.

Intensity – Move the Rock
Many people are willing to give up at the first obstacle. If you come at your goals with a low intensity, it’s going to be very easy to derail you, and any goal that’s worth achieving is going to have some obstacles along the path. Instead of letting those challenges derail you, you’ve got to focus hard on those challenges and overcome them. For example, if you’re watching your weight, instead of eating that delicious piece of pie, you’ve got to have the intensity and content of character to push it aside.

Diligence – That Dirty Little Secret
On the flip side of intensity is diligence – the ability to stick with something through thick and thin. It’s easy to ramp up the intensity in challenging moments, but it is diligence that will get you through the plateaus and the valleys where success seems far off. For example, intensity will get you through Thanksgiving dinner without gaining five pounds, but diligence will keep you from eating 500 calories a day more than you should and slowly gaining weight. It’s a focus for the long term.

Patience Is Power
Hand in hand with diligence is patience. Most goals don’t happen overnight. Many goals don’t happen in a year. In the society we live in today, it’s easy to have a mindset that you need results now and if they don’t immediately happen, something’s wrong. That mindset will keep you from achieving great things because it will cause you to abandon goals before you can possibly achieve them. Patience is an essential key for building a great life.

Contentment
It’s easy to fall into a mindset where you want what others have. It can be a very pernicious mindset to crawl out of, too. The key to success is to simply be happy with the things you have, even when you could have other things if you were willing to sacrifice some of your goals. Without goals, it’s easy to fall into a trap of keeping up with the Joneses and never being truly content with what you have.

Giving – The Great Misunderstanding
When we are scared or when we don’t feel confident about our lives, we tend to clench our fists and hold on to what we have. A big step towards being happy with our lives is a willingness to let go of that tight grip and give of ourselves to others, not just in the form of money, but in the form of time and talent and energy. By doing this, we can begin to see that the bounty of gifts we have is actually more than enough.

Is How to Have More Than Enough Worth Reading?
This book is actually very much like More Than Enough except with some additional workbook elements added in. I compared the two books side by side and found that there really wasn’t very much material at all cut from the original book. Instead, this version mostly just benefits from the direct addition of workbook materials.

If you’re just looking for a book that focuses on character and personal growth and how it relates to personal finance, either How to Have More Than Enough or More Than Enough will suffice. However, I think I would give this one the edge because, due to the workbook elements, it provides just a little bit more push for you to actually start evaluating your life and making positive changes and some more food for thought about living a values-oriented life.

Check out additional reviews and notes of How to Have More Than Enough on Amazon.com.

Saving Pennies or Dollars is a new semi-regular series on The Simple Dollar, inspired by a great discussion on The Simple Dollar’s Facebook page concerning frugal tactics that might not really save that much money. I’m going to take some of the scenarios described by the readers there and try to break down the numbers to see if the savings is really worth the time invested.

Connie writes in: I trade books by mail. It costs me about $2 to send out a book via media mail and I have to also spend the materials to wrap it. If I just swap page turners at my local used book store, I can get them at $2.50 a pop if I buy a bunch at once. Am I really saving anything trading by mail?

This sounds like you use PaperBackSwap, a service I love and have been using for years. Much like you, I’ve been curious at times whether or not it’s worth it and I’ve ran the numbers several times. Each time, I’m pretty sure I’ve decided it’s a good deal.

For starters, my estimate of the cost of my supplies is about ten cents. I use a sheet or two of printer paper, a single printed page with black and white ink on it, and some packing tape. Media mail varies by weight, but the typical range for me is $2.41 for a paperback in the mail. So, my total cost for shipping out a book is $2.51.

Now, let’s compare that to the used bookstore. At my local used bookstore, they will take most books in trade for anywhere from $0.25 to $1. They also sell used books at varying prices, anywhere from $1 (for Harlequin romances and the like) to $5 (mostly hardbacks). There’s also sales tax on your purchases, so that tacks on another 7%.

If I were just swapping for Harlequin romances, the local used bookstore would probably be cheaper. I could trade in one for $0.25, buy a new one for $1 (minus the $0.25 credit), and walk out of there having paid about $0.80 for a novel.

However, most of the books I want to read there are on the $3 or $4 shelves. I tend to read a lot of nonfiction, some science fiction and fantasy, and some general fiction, too. I might get $0.50 in trade for the books I bring in, but my net cost is either $2.50 or $3.50 for a book I want to read, plus the sales tax. That means either $2.68 or $3.75 for a new (to me) book after paying the sales tax.

If you add on top of that the fact that I can do PaperBackSwap at home whenever I want and there’s a much more extensive selection there, it starts to become a no-brainer.

In Connie’s case, she’s shipping out books for $2.51 via media mail, or she’s buying them for $2.68 at her local used bookstore. For her, the cost is pretty close, so it really comes down to other values. Would she rather support the local business? Or would she rather enjoy a larger selection online?

As for me, I’ll just keep using PaperBackSwap. It’s a service I’ve used for many years to recycle my read books because it’s convenient and the selection is pretty good.

There’s also another take-home point here. If you’re an avid reader, trading used books is really a bargain. Let’s say I spend eight hours reading a book that I swapped for $2.51. That means I was entertained for a cost of about $0.30 per hour.

While that’s not as cheap as the library, it’s pretty cheap, and there’s no danger of late fees or other such things if you don’t get your book finished or if your son drops a library book behind his bed.

Not only that, if you read something at least a little challenging, you’re growing your mind, too. You’re learning something new and improving your literacy. That’s what I call a real value.

Every Sunday, The Simple Dollar reviews a personal finance or other book of interest. Also available is a complete list of the hundreds of book reviews that have appeared on The Simple Dollar over the years.

A week or two ago, I was scanning the radio dial while on a road trip, looking for something interesting to listen to, when I stumbled upon a guy talking rather excitedly about investing. It was Adam Bold, and he was hosting a program called The Mutual Fund Show.

While I didn’t necessarily agree with his show on every point, I did agree with him on most things, and I did appreciate the enthusiasm he was bringing to investing. He made it seem incredibly approachable and even fun, while also keeping in mind the fact that it was quite important to your future.

After listening until the station faded out, I decided to see if Adam Bold had a book available to read, and he does. The Bold Truth About Investing is a thin little volume where Bold lays down his ten commandments for building personal wealth.

It is worth keeping in mind as you’re reading that Bold got his start by founding a financial advising firm, The Mutual Fund Store. While encouraging advising is naturally going to be part of his perspective (more so than mind), most of the advice in the book is quite good.

Know Yourself
Some people are aggressive in how they like to invest. Others are conservative. Some people tend to spend what they have. Others can barely stand the thought of their investments not growing. We all have different personalities. The trick is being able to put the elements of our personalities that limit us aside when making investment choices. You have to be able to follow sensible principles when you invest, some of which may override your personality’s default.

Know When to Invest
Bold suggests holding off any investing until you’ve achieved two things: pay off “bad” debt (meaning those with high or variable interest rates) and build a “rainy day”/emergency fund. I completely agree with this perspective. If you’re on a sinking ship right now – which is where you’re at if you have “bad” debt or don’t have an emergency fund – putting money into investments won’t right that ship. Investments help with the future, but they can’t help if things aren’t right today.

Know Your Advisor
This chapter provides some good basic advice for finding a financial advisor. Bold talks about fee-based and commission-based advisors (I’d pretty much insist on a fee-based one if I were ever choosing one) and covers some basic questions to ask advisors. I treaded pretty lightly on this chapter because of the fact that Adam runs his own financial advising shop, so there was at least a little promotion of The Mutual Fund Store here.

Have a Plan
A plan starts with a goal. What do you want to do with your money? Do you want to have a very secure retirement? Do you want to build a house in ten years? Do you want your children to be able to go to college in fifteen years? A goal helps to establish a timeline and also helps to establish how much risk you should take on – without a goal, you’re flying blind. From a goal comes a plan – risk, diversification, updating your investments regularly, and so on.

Be in the Best Funds Possible
By “best funds possible,” Bold does not mean the ones that had huge returns the last few years. He means funds that have a long history of having solid and reliable returns. For me, this usually means index funds, but Bold doesn’t really look at those too much. Instead, he encourages looking at all funds and find ones with a mix of risk level that all have consistency in their returns over the long haul.

Avoid Any Hidden Costs
Here’s where I agree with Bold wholeheartedly. When you buy an investment, know every single fee involved before you buy. What’s the mutual fund’s expense ratio? More importantly, is the fund carrying a load – and if it is, avoid it like the plague. Bold does come out a bit against index funds in this chapter, arguing that although they cost more they tend to have a better return over the long haul. That might be true in some funds, but their year-over-year variability makes them more volatile. I’ll stick with my low cost index funds.

Don’t Buy What You Don’t Understand
If you don’t know what exactly an investment is, don’t invest in it. That’s simple enough. How deep does the knowledge have to go, though? Bold basically encourages people to be wary. If you can’t explain how the investment works in a sentence or two and can’t easily find out what the investment is made of, then you shouldn’t put your money in there. A black box managed by someone else is not something to trust your future to.

Be Proactive About Managing Your Retirement Investments
If you’re not investing for your retirement yet, start now. Start immediately. You need to be on the ball with your retirement, and the earlier you start, the less you’ll have to save (yes, seriously – if you start now, you won’t have to save as much as you would if you started in a few years). If you’re not sure what to do, just use your company’s 401(k) and choose a target retirement fund – you can always change it a bit later on. If you don’t have a 401(k), start a Roth IRA. The key is to start saving now.

Stick to Your Plan
You can’t react emotionally to what the stock market is doing. If you do that, you’re going to make investment mistakes. Markets are going to go up and down. That’s just what they do. When you invest in stocks, part of that investment means enjoying the years when the market is up 15 or 20%, but holding on for dear life during years like 2008 where the market is down 40%. If you jump off when things are flying downwards, all you’re doing is locking in your losses, because when you move to something more conservative, you’re giving up the “bounce” that stocks get when they hit bottom and rebound.

Live Well, For You Cannot Take It With You
When you’ve reached your investing goal, that means it’s time to start spending it. A 401(k) or a Roth IRA is meant to be used when you reach retirement age. It can be scary to see that total start to go down, but if you don’t start spending it, all you’ve done is create a very valuable asset to hand down to your kids.

Is The Bold Truth About Investing Worth Reading?
This is a short book, one that’s clearly written for people who are thinking that they ought to invest but are very nervous and unsure about the prospect. Bold uses very clear and straightforward language when talking about these things. I can easily see this book being exactly what a person might need to get over their nervousness about jumping into investing.

While I don’t agree with Bold on every point – for example, I think most people can manage their investments themselves using online tools and I think that index funds are the best way to go for investing – I agree with him on the vast majority of the principles outlined in this book. This is a great book to read for anyone who is trying to make up their mind about getting started with investing.

Check out additional reviews and notes of The Bold Truth About Investing on Amazon.com.

Every Sunday, The Simple Dollar reviews a personal finance or other book of interest. Also available is a complete list of the hundreds of book reviews that have appeared on The Simple Dollar over the years.

Every once in a while, I’ll stumble upon a book that’s basically already covered the ground I had planned on using for a post series in the future. This is one of those books.

Yes, starting in February, I was planning a “how to garden on a tight budget” series. The problem is, after reading this wonderful book by Maureen Gilmer, that post series is pretty much redundant. This book covers all of the ground I intended to cover in that series.

I guess this would lead to the question of why I would write a series about budget gardening. Simply put, a garden is a great way to produce vegetables and fruits and herbs inexpensively for your kitchen, plus it gives you a great outdoors activity to fill the months of spring, summer, and fall. The one catch is that gardening tends to have a large startup budget, one that you might be repaying for quite a while out of the savings on your garden’s produce.

So, how can one reduce the startup costs? At the same time, are there any tricks for reducing the ongoing costs of gardening in the form of things like seeds, fertilizer, and so forth? That’s pretty much exactly what this book covers and it provides a lot of great answers.

Stretch Every Dollar
The book opens with a focus on the absolute essential equipment you need to get a garden up and running. One key section of this chapter that I particularly enjoyed listed about fifteen key garden tools (like a hand trowel, a pointed shovel, a hoe, a small leaf rake, and so on) and identified specifically what you should look for when buying that item. What features does it need to do its job well over a long period of time? The chapter also includes some homebrew recipes for insect repellent (mix four tablespoons liquid dish soap into a gallon of water, then spray on plants), fertilizer (a crazy mix of common household ingredients that I’m going to try soon), and other such items.

From there, the book moves onto how to shop for the initial plants you need, incorporating some great standard frugality tactics into garden supplying. One good suggestion is to just buddy up with other gardeners, so that when you buy a multi-pack of plants (saving money by buying in bulk) you can split them up among the people involved. Another good tactic is to save seeds and cuttings from previous years, but this requires that you start off with non-hybridized seeds (from a Seed Savers catalog, for example).

From here, Gilmer moves onto making good soil. Soil can be expensive if you’re buying bags of topsoil or potting soil, so she suggests making your own. Hunt around for a source of manure (if you know a livestock farmer, cattle manure is fantastic for this). Use alfalfa as a mulch. Better yet, make your own compost (which is something we do) out of your leftover plant scraps. It’s not hard to make really rich soil for your garden at a pittance.

Environmental Cents
The focus of this section is mostly on how to reduce your utility bills using your plants, making them serve double duty (or perhaps triple duty). The first example is the advantage of planting shade trees around your home, effectively keeping the hot sun out in the summer and insulating a bit in the winter. Fast-growing shade trees are plentiful and will let you start reaping that advantage in just a handful of years.

Another method is to choose ornamental plants that are drought-resistant so that you don’t have to actively water them very often. Instead, you can rely on the rainwater in your area to provide plenty of water for them, enabling you to cut down on your water use.

This section also focuses on the value of reusing the things you have on hand. Use large twigs to build lattices and other structures for your vines to grow on (we do this every year for our cucumbers). Use grass clippings and leaves as a resource for the composter or for direct mulching on your garden. Instead of buying large rocks or cement blocks, keep your eye out for flat rocks that would make for beautiful garden decorations.

Gratis – As It Should Be
The final section of this book focuses on how to get free things for your garden, from plant and seed samples to wonderful ideas. One great suggestion is to simply start following good gardening blogs (a couple of my favorites are A Way to Garden and Garden Rant).

However, the real focus of this section is on saving your own seeds and cuttings for the future. In the case of seeds, this requires that you start from non-hybridized plants or seeds of your own, which you can get from a group like Seed Savers. The book provides a great guide on techniques for saving seeds and cuttings. Once you’ve established this as a routine, you can begin trading your excess seeds for new ones, enabling you to try new plants without spending a dime.

Is The Small Budget Gardener Worth Reading?
If you’ve ever liked gardening and would like a few frugal tips, pick up this book. Furthermore, if you’ve ever thought about gardening but been daunted by the startup costs, you must read this book.

It’s colorful, fun, easy to read, and full of wonderful frugal gardening tips. That adds up to a great book to me. Ours is already accumulating dog-eared pages.

Check out additional reviews and notes of The Small Budget Gardener on Amazon.com.

Every Sunday, The Simple Dollar reviews a personal finance or other book of interest. Also available is a complete list of the hundreds of book reviews that have appeared on The Simple Dollar over the years.

I’ll be the first to admit that personal finance workbooks never really clicked for me. I’ve tried reading and using a few of them over the years, but virtually every time, I felt like the forms and blanks within the book were constraining me and didn’t match what I wanted to do. I have always felt much better reading books until I understood the concepts, then doing things myself independently of the books.

Of course, such an attitude is a direct reflection of how my mind works. For other people – including a lot of readers of The Simple Dollar – workbooks are a great way to start going through the thought process of getting one’s finances in order. They do an excellent job of connecting the orderly process of one writer’s personal finance philosophy to a set of step-by-step tools for readers.

This, of course, brings me to David Bach’s Finish Rich Workbook. Bach has written a pile of books over the years, many of which I’ve reviewed (Smart Couples Finish Rich, Smart Women Finish Rich, and Start Late, Finish Rich, for starters) that all espouse the same general personal financie philosophy of cutting back on unnecessary expenditures and channeling that into long term financial goals. Yes, he’s the guy who came up with the much-debated “latte factor.”

Start the Journey to Living and Finishing Rich
The book starts off by checking to see what you know about your finances through a series of checklists. The items on these lists often push you toward expanding your knowledge in specific areas that you don’t have a good grasp of. For example, one entry says “I know whether my income would be protected by disability insurance should I (or my partner) become unable to work. If I have disability insurance, I know the amount of the coverage when the benefits would start, and whether they would be taxable. If I don’t have disability insurance, I know why I don’t.” If you’re unable to check that box, you’ve got a pretty clear conversation and thought starter right there.

Find Your Money
Here, Bach encourages people to essentially make their own net worth calculator by collecting together all of the things that they own (including financial accounts) and all off the debts that they have, then subtracting the debts from the assets. This is a very good thumbnail for seeing how your financial progress is going, particularly if you routinely calculate it and compare it to earlier results.

Create Your Purpose-Focused Financial Plan
I actually quite liked this section. The plan that Bach wants you to create starts off by you figuring out what the five things you value most in the world are, then assembling a goal related to each one that you want to achieve, then building your financial plan based on those five goals. For example, if I value education, I might have a goal of saving for half of my children’s college education, so how would I achieve that? I’d open a 529 (an immediate action), set up an automatic contribution, and watch it build over time.

Find Your Latte Factor
How do you pay for these financial goals? Bach’s solution is to dig through your life and look for ways where you’re spending money needlessly, then trim or eliminate them. The “latte factor,” of course, refers specifically to cutting out an expensive morning coffee, but that just scratches the surface of the idea. For many, this seems un-fun, but I tend to look at this as a challenge of sorts, seeking out things that I can cut without making life less enjoyable.

The Debt-Free Solution
Here, Bach encourages people to move toward a debt free life, which is a great financial goal for anyone to achieve. The plan is essentially a pretty standard debt repayment plan, but Bach does a pretty good job of walking a person through assembling a plan that works for them.

Pay Yourself First
So, you’ve got all of these goals and plans, but how are you going to make it work? One big tactic to use is to pay yourself first, meaning that you allocate money to these goals and plans right off the bat, then strive to make life work with what’s left over. This is a pretty strong strategy, as we often modify our lifestyle choices based on the cash available to us.

Create a Security Plan
Here, Bach delves into insurance issues, looking at things like life insurance, long term care insurance, and so on. These tools are there to make sure that all of your hard work doesn’t go for naught because of an unexpected event. Bach’s advice is largely good but occasionally delves into what I would consider unusual recommendations, so I would use this chapter as a jumping off point, not as a final answer.

Recapture Your Dreams
Here, Bach looks at the ins and outs of specific investments. How do you need to invest if you want a high return (with high risk, of course)? What about if you need a very safe investment that has a steady (but lower) return? Bach walks through savings accounts, bond investments, stock investments, and so on with the goal of matching specific investments to the goals you’ve set in the earlier chapters.

How to Hire a Financial Advisor
My advice is generally to not hire a financial advisor and figure out instead how to do things for yourself, but many people feel better hiring one anyway. This chapter largely serves as a research and interview guide for helping you to find an advisor that works well for you. The key piece of advice here is a home run: never delegate control of your money. Your advisor should never be able to make any financial moves without your explicit permission. Allowing such moves opens you up to be burnt badly.

Keep a FinishRich Journal
Bach’s final advice is to simply keep a journal describing your financial journey. Why do such a thing? Writing a journal entry makes you reflect on the things you’re writing about and helps you think about the journey ahead from where you’re at in a very intimate way. I’ve been an avid journaler of my whole life for many years and I find it very valuable for reflecting on my day just passed and the days ahead.

Is The Finish Rich Workbook Worth Reading?
This is a book that’s very strong in terms of holding your hand and walking you through each step, but it’s a little light on the depth of specific issues at times. If you’re looking for something that will help you get started, this is perfect. If you’re looking for something to answer all of your questions that you’ve ever had, this book will be a little light.

I would absolutely recommend this book to someone who works well with a guided environment… with one caveat. Some of the specifics in this book are a bit dated, as the most recent revision came out in 2003. The advice is still quite strong, but there are references to financial institutions that no longer exist and tax rules that have been superceded since 2003. A revision could be in order here. If it gets a revision, this book would get a thumbs-up as a solid beginner’s workbook from me. For now, it still gets a thumbs-up, but perhaps not a really strong one.

Check out additional reviews and notes of The Finish Rich Workbook on Amazon.com.

Every Sunday, The Simple Dollar reviews a personal finance or other book of interest. Also available is a complete list of the hundreds of book reviews that have appeared on The Simple Dollar over the years.

If you’ve read The Simple Dollar for a while, you know that I’m a big believer in the maxim that time is money. I’m quite passionate about time management, because I see it as a way to maximize what I earn from the time I spend working so that I can spend more of my time doing other things that I’m passionate about, like spending time with my family or reading engaging books.

In fact, one of the most powerful books I’ve ever read was David Allen’s classic time management book Getting Things Done. It drastically altered how I managed my time and made it possible for me to hold down a full time job and build The Simple Dollar at the same time while also maintaining a home life with a good marriage and two very young children.

Since then, I’ve read a lot of good time management books. For the most part, they’ve simply supplemented the GTD system that I already use with specific tactics or made me re-evaluate some life choices in a philosophical way.

This book, 18 Minutes by Peter Bregman, comes very highly regarded from multiple readers of The Simple Dollar who recommended it to me (I get about ten book recommendation emails a week). Bregman writes a column for the Harvard Business Review on managing yourself, of which a significant focus is time management.

The focus of this book is on eliminating distraction, finding focus, and making good choices about what to do with your time. His approach is a bit different in that he talks about making proactive distractions for yourself, so that when you’re distracted from the task at hand, you stumble right into something else that’s useful.

Pause
So many of us with busy lives are so caught up in the overabundance of things that we have on our to-do list that we never bother to stop for a moment and ask ourselves why we’re doing thse things. Often, we’re filling our day with things that are, in the big scheme of things, pretty unimportant, and those unimportant things are crowding out the genuinely important ones.

Bregman’s advice is to simply “pause” for a bit and get things in perspective. A “pause,” in Bregman’s book, is a time where you simply look at the things you’re doing and order them in terms of how important they are to you in your overall life. Where do we want to be going in a general sense? What kind of person do we want to be?

Recognize that all of the choices we make have costs and they have benefits. A choice to work late might mean less sleep or less time building a deep relationship with our spouse or our wife. What’s the right choice? It can be a challenging question, but without pausing sometimes, we don’t have the time to give it the thought it needs to be sure we’re coming up with the right answer.

What Is This Year About?
One big part in determining what’s important is thinking about the things you want to achieve over the medium term and the long term. Where do you want to be a year from now? Five years from now? Which of the things on your plate is most likely to help you get to that place?

So much of what we do on a daily basis has little impact on our lives from that perspective, and thus it’s worthwhile to actively lower the importance of such things. The things that are actually important are the things that have long term impact on our lives and we should strive to focus on those as much as possible.

What Is This Day About?
This, of course, brings us to today. Once we understand what big things we want from life, it’s easier to prioritize the things that need to be done today. In other words, if we have a long checklist of things to take care of, which of those actually has a significant positive impact toward our long term ideas?

One way to effectively do this is to simply surround yourself with things that all have a positive impact toward our long term goals. Load your office down with things you’d like to make progress on over the long term, and do the same with your home.

Thus, when you are distracted, something that Bregman more or less describes as inevitable, the things you’re distracted by are also things that relate to a long-term goal. For example, if one of your big goals is improving your fitness, put a resistance band near your desk. That way, when you’re distracted, you’ll see that band and do some stretches, filling your time with something goal-oriented instead of something useless.

Is 18 Minutes Worth Reading?
The entire focus of this book seems to be dealing with our overcrowded lives, where our day-to-day activities don’t match up with the things we want out of our lives. I found that it offered a lot of good, sensible advice, but the specific implementations seem to be extremely varied in that you’re going to find some that work for you and a lot that do not, and the ones that work for you are going to be different than the ones that work for someone else.

For me, I felt like I got quite a lot out of this book. The ideas in it made me reorganize my office in a more “goal-oriented” fashion, as described above, as that was the most powerful idea that came from this book for me. If I can get one “home run” idea from a book, then it was a worthwhile read for me, and I think there are a lot of “home run” ideas in this book for people struggling with time management.

Check out additional reviews and notes of 18 Minutes on Amazon.com.

Every Sunday, The Simple Dollar reviews a personal finance or other book of interest. Also available is a complete list of the hundreds of book reviews that have appeared on The Simple Dollar over the years.

One of the biggest keys to personal success is found in the title of this book. Willpower. Do you have the ability to consistently take the less easy path in an effort to achieve a goal?

Willpower is a struggle for most everyone, including me. It’s hard to consistently make the right choice for a greater good, particularly when there is a lot of appeal in the easier choice. It can be hard to not buy an item you want. It can be hard to not take another drink. It can be hard to devote your evenings to building a business. I’ve been there.

Roy Baumeister and John Tierney have put together a fascinating book on the topic of willpower here and since it’s a topic that runs through The Simple Dollar, I felt a review of it might be worthwhile.

Is Willpower More Than a Metaphor?
Willpower definitely exists. It’s observable in the sense that people will choose not to make the choice that would bring short-term comfort and will make the choice that brings longer-term benefits. The authors draw on the example of Amanda Palmer, who worked as a “living statue” through some pretty horrible situations. She made herself stand still in order to do the job and to build a reputation as someone who could handle this through whatever might happen. The key? In Amanda’s words, focus on one project at a time. Be so single-minded that nothing else really matters.

Where Does the Power in Willpower Come From?
In other words, how do people find the ability to “power through”? Usually, the basis for willpower comes from a backbone of something enjoyable or something you value or something you physically need. The authors discuss all of these things, including the need for adequate sleep and adequate nutrition to have adequate willpower as well as less basic desires such as family and friendship and human interaction. All of these things create the “power” we need to push through and achieve great things.

A Brief History of the To-Do List
To-do lists typically don’t work because they’re usually loaded with things that drag you in different directions. One thing might involve a commitment to your family, while another things points you to your office and yet another involves a promise made to a friend. One’s at home, one’s at the office, and one’s somewhere else. It’s incredibly hard to follow through on such a list if there’s no consistency. The authors actually take a look at the GTD time management philosophy as an approach to solving this challenge.

Decision Fatigue
Sometimes, our willpower breaks because we’re faced with too many decisions in a given day, which results in “decision fatigue.” We’re tired of making decisions and just don’t want to think. What’s the solution here? You should create a situation where the “easy” path is the one that matches your goal through advance work. Create situations for yourself so that it becomes very easy to continue to press toward your goal.

Where Have All the Dollars Gone?
Another area where willpower shines is money, something that readers of The Simple Dollar may have picked up on over the years. You have to have willpower to not spring money leaks all over the place. What’s the solution to this? Quantifying. Keep track of every penny you spend so that you know exactly where every dime is going. This works in other areas, too, such as food consumption and exercise.

Can Willpower Be Strengthened?
Just like almost anything else, willpower is strengthened through practice. If you find yoursel able to push through to achieve one goal through consistent willpower, other goals that require such willpower become easier. This ties in well with the single-minded nature of willpower, which is itself something to practice. When you focus in on a goal over and over again and show yourself that you can do it, doing it again becomes just that much easier.

Outsmarting Yourself in the Heart of Darkness
How do you keep going in particularly trying times? The authors use the example of Henry Morton Stanley’s exploration of Africa to show how one effective method for mastering willpower works: cutting off your route back to the place where you were at. Tempted by food? Throw out all of the junk food and you’ve made it much harder to eat that junk food.

Did a Higher Power Help Eric Clapton and Mary Karr Stop Drinking?
Here, the authors look at Alcoholics Anonymous. Does belief in God cause people to stop drinking? The authors seem to say that faith in a higher power can be a powerful self-motivator in terms of willpower. When it becomes difficult, people can look to their faith. They don’t go deeply into theology here, but I think there’s some very interesting possibilities in terms of looking at faith’s connection to willpower and the idea of free will.

Raising Strong Children
How do you raise children to have willpower? The key is to not focus on the end goal of the things they’re doing. Instead, focus on the process. Focus on making those individual hard choices along the way that produces a goal. Don’t praise the “A” on the report card. Instead, praise the hard work that it took to get that “A.” I fully intend to tell my children someday that I’m not really proud of the good grade, but that I’m proud of the work that went into it and the improvement as a person that came out of that work.

The Perfect Storm of Dieting
The book winds down by tying together many of these threads into one common application of willpower in the modern world: dieting. Most of the tactics and ideas in this book show up in dieting, from making the small decisions to cutting off the escape route, and it ties deeply into self-esteem issues for many. One big tactic: focus on the day-to-day achievements, not the numbers on the scale.

Is Willpower Worth Reading?
Willpower addresses a fundamental human challenge with good humor, great ideas, and science backing it up. It’s loaded with thoughtful approaches backed up by research and intriguing stories all over the place.

I view the challenge of willpower as a fundamental human challenge, and this book is a brilliant analysis of that condition. I’d recommend it to anyone and it’s one of the best books I’ve read this year.

I am absolutely going to re-read this book, and soon. I can’t pay a higher compliment to a book than that.

Check out additional reviews and notes of Willpower on Amazon.com.