Andrew Hallam isn’t an investment guru, he’s a teacher in Singapore who has amassed a net worth over a million dollars doing everything you’re supposed to. Spending less than you earn, investing in a smart way (keeping costs low), and all the various tenets we learn over our lifetimes that, honestly, should’ve been taught in high school. How your neighbor driving the Porsche is probably still paying off that car note and you shouldn’t be that envious of an asset that, in reality, is a liability that constantly loses value.

Best of all, the book is entertaining and easy to read. It’s not dry, it’s not boring, and it has plenty of anecdotes to keep you interested.

One anecdote jumped out at me and it was a in the very first chapter, the first rule of wealth. He begins the chapter by talking about how we should spend within our means and how his definition of wealth was in two parts – you have enough money so you never have to work, should you choose so, and your investments generate two times the median income. I’d never heard of someone quantifying the term “wealthy” but his definition made perfect sense. He goes on to share stories about cars and how foolish it is for people to spend so much on a depreciating item.

Up until this point, with the exception of the definition of wealth, it’s pretty standard personal finance advice. Then you get the gem. He shares an opinion from “one of the savviest guys” he’s ever met, named Russ, and his opinion of cars mirrored that of mine (maybe that’s why I think it’s a gem!). First, buying an expensive car is foolish because it’s a depreciating asset, you simply lose so much money on a car in the first two years. But that’s OK, if you are already wealthy, there’s nothing wrong with losing money on a luxury item. The problem is if you’re trying to become wealthy. Excellent point.

He then goes on to say that if you’re trying to build wealth, you want to find a car that has low mileage, is a few years old, and is in great condition so you could, in theory, resell it after a few years for roughly the same price. I did that with my first car, a 2 year old Acura Integra that, when someone totaled it, I got a check for my purchase price (and I drove it for three years). Hallam did this very same thing and actually profited from each of his cars.

None of the nine rules are mind-blowing, but that’s because the basic tenets of responsible personal finance are not mind-blowing. What Hallam has done is package it in a way that a high school student could understand and, over time, implement it. The language is easy to understand, there aren’t esoteric passages or pages of charts, it’s something that will be useful for a young (or not so young) person with an interest in personal finance.

Millionaire Teacher: The Nine Rules of Wealth You Should Have Learned in School from personal finance blog Bargaineering.com.

Personally, I agree with a lot of the arguments and it was one of the reasons why I wrote this Devil’s Advocate post on why you shouldn’t invest in the stock market. That said, I still invest in index funds and a smattering of dividend stocks.

So what can you do about it? The key is being educated and asking the right questions. It’s in understanding what is a good idea and what’s not. ETFs, in general, may be a good investment but that doesn’t mean every single ETF is worth looking at. An index fund might be a good idea but are you suppose to buy and hold and never think about it? Probably not. In the end, you need to be educated in order to come out ahead and, unfortunately, it’s rarely as easy as a simple rule of thumb.

All in all, an interesting book that I enjoyed reading.

As an aside, if the last name sounds familiar, it’s the name of one of the lead characters, Roy Munson, from Kingpin – a classic.

Rigged Money by Lee Munson from personal finance blog Bargaineering.com.

Wolfe and Smith worked together at Fortune Magazine with Wolfe was an art director and Smith was a senior writer and editor. Buckles was the economics consultant and is currently teaches economics at Vanderbilt. Doty is an acclaimed cartoonist who has appeared in about a million different things.

The book is structured like a Q&A and separated into seven chapters:

1. Money
2. Booms & Busts
3. Taxing & Spending
4. Getting Into Debt
5. The Fed
6. High-Flying Finance
7. Globalization

Each section has about a dozen questions, each with an illustration that does a good job of helping you visualize the idea, and each answer is fairly brief.

What’s nice about the book isn’t that it covers economics, it’s that it covers economics in the context of our financial system. For example, it goes into detail as to what the Federal Reserve does, why it does it, and what impact it has. While you could replace Federal Reserve with “central bank” and talk about it in more abstract terms, using the Federal Reserve puts things into context. I think that helps people understand things better.

If you’re curious about it, Amazon has a preview of some of the questions that you can check out to see if it’s your type of book.

Easy Economics: A Visual Guide to What You Need to Know from personal finance blog Bargaineering.com.

Affluence Intelligence by Stephen Golbart, PHD, and Joan Indursky Difuria, MFT is that second type of book written with the approach of the first. It’s designed to help reshape your mind when it comes to money but it does it in a step by step manner that is easy to follow. The book may sound like it’s tackling a “soft” subject but it does it in a very structured and analytic way, which I find is rare in books in that second category.

One of the first things I do when I get a non-fiction book, regardless of the topic, is check out the background of the author or authors. I like reading the opinions of authors with a perspective I don’t share and in this regard the two authors certainly deliver. Both authors are psychologists and have worked with patients with psychological issues. Joan Difuria worked for a program that helped people with schizophrenia and manic depression. Stephen Goldbart codirected a public health program for “severely disturbed adults.” They have hands on experience with people who have trouble with reality. I was eager to read about their experience and guidance for folks who just have a little trouble with money (when you think about it, money is a by-product of our actions and if you can get your mind right with respect to the world, it’s more likely that you’ll be successful financially in that world).

What is affluence intelligence? The authors begin by defining what they call affluence, which is different than wealth. Affluence is about finding balance and happiness in your life, which doesn’t necessarily come with a lot of money. As I wrote about once in how someone could be unhappy with $1,000,000 and Notorious BIG immortalized in music, more money doesn’t necessarily mean a happier life. Affluence is more than that. Affluence is about finding happiness in your life (there are seven key areas) and making it so that you can achieve that level of happiness by way of improving and outlining four key areas – priorities, behaviors, attitudes, and financial effectiveness.

The book is full of anecdotes about their clients and the majority of them involve folks who are doing well financially but doing poorly in their life. They’re making money, more money than the average family, but they’re stressed because they’re either living beyond their means or unfulfilled at work or simply stressed about their job. It’s stunning how common their stories seem once you read them over and over again. I can see how a program like this could be extremely helpful in getting them back on the track.

Review: Affluence Intelligence from personal finance blog Bargaineering.com.

Peter Walsh is a designer who is the expert organization on TLC’s Clean Sweep, among other things. He’s an organizational guru who is a regular guest on the The Oprah Winfrey and has his own show, Enough Already! with Peter Walsh, on The Oprah Winfrey Network. While these are all organizational tips for your space, does he have the chops to organize your financial life? I argue that he does and in part because his approach is similar to my own (towards financial clutter).

Walsh’s argument is that clutter and disorganization causes stress. Whether it’s financial clutter, of too much debt, too many credit cards, or any number of things; or physical clutter, the result is the same. When you walk into a room that’s neat, where things are put away, you probably feel calmer than in a room that looks like a tornado hit it. Part of that has to do with the feeling that a tornado hit room should be picked up. Part of it is just your mind’s reaction to chaos. Either way, the clutter causes stress on some level.

One of the biggest reasons why people hold onto stuff they don’t need is because they are worried they might need it later. I know I’m like this and most people are. There isn’t much that separates a healthy dose of this mentality and an unhealthy dose (think: “hoarders”). What does Peter say about this? Clutter affects your life and the worry of tomorrow prevents you from living today.

Case in point – we recently traded in my Toyota Celica and I have four nearly new tires sitting in our basement underneath the stairs. The tires were the ones the car had when I bought it from its original owner in Florida. They were performance tires designed for the snow-less conditions of Florida. In theory, I had hoped to used them in the summer but I never did. They didn’t take up any valuable space but I kept them because I might have wanted to use them. Now I don’t have the car and the tires are still downstairs, waiting to be recycled or sold. I think in my case it was a good reason to keep them around, tires are expensive, but now I have no reason to keep them (the only reason I haven’t done anything about it is because I haven’t done anything about it).

Walsh did a few morning shows to kick off his book and this one with Good Morning America is a good one if this book interests you (it also has an excerpt you can check out):

If you have difficulty with clutter, financial or otherwise, give it a look.

Review: Lighten Up by Peter Walsh from personal finance blog Bargaineering.com.

As regular readers will know, I really enjoy books that give us an “inside look” at an interesting industry (I’m afraid a book about librarians, as much as I love libraries, just wouldn’t cut it). It’s why I enjoyed On The Brink by Hank Paulson and The Weekend That Changed Wall-Street by Maria Bartiromo. In those cases, the books were behind the scenes look at the crisis itself. Dillian’s memoir takes place during the crisis (it starts with the start of his career, which goes all the way back to right before 9/11), and it includes the crisis itself and Lehman’s final years.

I’m still making my way through the book, which comes out this week, but it’s been a fun read. I’m surprised at how the clichés, which you always assume can’t possibly be true, are actually true, at least in Dillian’s experience. The single minded nature of the financial services industry – “make money and survive, lose money and die” – seems so callous that it can’t be real. But it seems to be.

I’m also surprised at how pedigree makes all the difference in that world and that Dillian, who wasn’t from a top notch school and didn’t play lacrosse at a prep school on Long Island, made it in on hard work and smarts.

It’s first and foremost a memoir and a bit of a guilty pleasure look at the financial industry from the inside.

Street Freak by Jared Dillian from personal finance blog Bargaineering.com.

For those who don’t know, S. Truett Cathy is the founder of Chick-fil-A. If you don’t know what Chick-fil-A is, I’m very sorry for you because it’s probably one of my favorite fast food places. The food is great, the service has always been phenomenal, and I appreciate that they treat their employees very well. Cathy is also a very religious person and the fact that Chick-fil-A’s are closed on Sundays (yes, a food service business that does $4 billion in sales is closed 1/7th of the time) is irrefutable proof that the man lives what he says.

The book discusses wealth in a very matter of fact way – it’s not the panacea to life’s troubles and it’s not the Holy Grail. Money is simply a claim check on other people’s products and services. It’s a concrete way of saying money enables you to buy stuff and pay for services, which is true. Once you have enough, is more necessary?

To that end, he uses lots of examples, and several interviews, to drive point the home that the point of life isn’t money. Once you acquire enough, you should looking towards the future and how you can help others. Sometimes helping others means sharing your time, sometimes it’s sharing your resources, and sometimes it’s sharing your love. There are some problems money cannot solve (this mirrors something my grandfather once said – “If all your problems can be solved with money, you should be very happy.”).

Finally, my favorite quote from the entire book:

If it takes seven days to make a living, you ought to be doing something else.

I enjoyed this book thoroughly.

Wealth: Is It Worth It? by S. Truett Cathy from personal finance blog Bargaineering.com.

One of the common complaints about our educational system is that high school is mostly preparation for college. If you don’t go to college, very few of the classes translate to real life (how many high schools offer any sort of personal finance education?). Even if you go to college, your high school classes are simply preparation for the college classroom, not college life. Nowhere is this more evident than in mathematics. You start with algebra, explaining in terms of X, Y, Z (and A, B, C when you need more variables), rather than more relatable terms (we do throw a bone in terms of “word problems,” but that’s generally not how it’s taught). Algebra is preparation for trigonometry, which is preparation for calculus. There are few daily life uses for calculus.

This book just repackages all that early arithmetic and puts it in terms that we deal with every day, from calculating a 15% tip to figuring out how much mulch you need for your 10′ x 5′ garden plot. It teaches you some shortcuts, like the Rule of 72, but mostly tackles daily math problems in a way that shows you why it was important to learn that stuff as a kid.

As you can problem tell from my review, this isn’t a life changing book on the level of The Richest Man in Babylon but it’s far more practical. If you’re the type of person who isn’t particularly good at math and often find yourself in tricky situations, this book is worth checking out. If you have a strong math background, you probably won’t get much out of this book outside of a few shortcuts and more clever ways to solve a problem.

Math for Grownups by Laura Laing from personal finance blog Bargaineering.com.

Christine Romans is the host of Your Bottom Line, CNN’s Saturday personal finance show, and regular contributor to CNN’s AMerican Morning and other CNN programs. She’s had a career in personal finance journalism and received an Emmy Award in 2004 for “Exporting America,” a Lou Dobbs Tonight investigation on the impact of globalization on the U.S. worker.

The core message of the book is that after the economic collapse and the emergence of the “new Normal,” people might be feeling the ways of old creeping back into their lives. The creditor mentality of buy it now, pay for it later; something that was repressed during the collapse and subsequent recession, is starting to reemerge and Romans gives advice on how to combat it. This broad personal finance book, which covers everything from credit scores to student loan debt, is built around that core philosophical idea perfectly summarized in the subtitle – if you can’t afford it, put it down.

The book covers a variety of topics, many of which are glossed over in other personal finance books, and does so in less than three hundred pages. Here are the different chapters:

1. Reset, Repair, Recover
2. Spending Your $$$$$
3. Your Job
4. Debt
5. Credit Cards
6. Home Sweet Home
7. Save, Invest, Retire
8. Family Money
9. Health Care
10. Small Business
11. Government

As you can see, it’s a pretty wide variety of topics (small business and government, outside of taxes, aren’t usually covered in basic personal finance books) but I think it did a good job at tackling all the issues. The government chapter is one in which a bit of editorializing starts creeping in, which is fine if you can look past it, but otherwise it’s a pretty balanced book.

Review: Smart is the New Rich by Christine Romans from personal finance blog Bargaineering.com.

This review of TurboTax applies to the software used to handle Tax Year 2010 returns.

EasyImport W-2, 1099

This year, it seems that automation was their top priority because they increased the number of individuals who can now import your W-2 data directly from your employer’s payroll system. They work with many of the payroll providers, like ADP, and now over 250,000 employers are supported. It’s a more than doubling of the number of supported employers.

In addition to importing data from employers, they also have the ability to pull tax information from banks and brokers as well. They can import 1099 information from ninety financial institutions, including A.G. Edwards, E*Trade Securities, Scottrade, USAA, and Vanguard.

Importing this data is one of the most time consuming and error prone parts of tax preparation. We have about a dozen 1099-INTs and after a while you start entering them in on autopilot, which is when you start making mistakes. All it takes is one minor error and you trigger an investigation because your 1099-INT doesn’t match the 1099-INT at the IRS and there’s no way for software to protect you (they don’t have access to your paper 1099-INT!)

So I think the expansion of this feature is the real hallmark of this year’s edition.

Optimizing Your Deductions

Unless you’re a tax accountant, you can’t be confident that the deductions you pick are going to be the best ones for you. There are so many competing deductions out there that every software package should have this next feature – a way to optimize your deductions.

The best example is education credits. They have changed so much in the last few years that it’s hard to remember which is which. Remember the Hope Credit? Yeah, it’s gone. We have the American Opportunity Credit and the Lifetime Learning Credit. If you have no idea what the difference, you’re not alone.

Fortunately, TurboTax does and they’ll ask you a series of questions and give you the best option. They will also calculate the credit of every alternative, so you know which is better and by how much. All too often a software package will rely on you to decide and just do the math, this takes it one step further. When you think about it, that’s what the software should be doing.

Summary

I don’t know how this compares with the advances made by other tax prep packages but they’ve continued to innovate and improve on a good product, one that I started using seven years ago. I think that most people, in picking which package to use, typically follow whatever their parents used or whatever they used in the past. Familiarity breeds a bit of contempt and, honestly, why fix something that’s not broken? If, however, your tax prep package doesn’t import as much data as possible and forces you to enter it in manually, you might want to check the list of supporting financial institutions to see if you can shave some time off the prep process.

Giveaway!

The kind folks at TurboTax also gave me some TurboTax Premier Online codes to giveaway to three lucky Bargaineering.com readers. All I ask is that you leave a comment below stating your favorite tax deduction, I’ll select three winners on March 16th at noon. If you want to leave a comment but don’t want to win (because you’ve already filed or some other reason), please say so in the comments.

Good luck!

TurboTax 2011 Review from personal finance blog Bargaineering.com.

Added bonus, every recipe in the book is gluten free.

If you’ve been looking for ways to use your slow cooker, as we have, this book is a great way to start. Not only are the recipes simple and fast, they give you a better idea of what can be done with a slow cooker since it’s filled with all sorts of recipes, from breakfast dishes to desserts. It really runs the gamut and shares tips on how to cut down on costs in preparing them. Best of all, they’re all set it and forget it type recipes that take 6-8 hours to make. It’s perfect for people who can’t cook because they are ultra busy – set it when you leave and your meal is ready when you get home.

Review: Make It Fast, Cook It Slow by Stephanie O’Dea from personal finance blog Bargaineering.com.

Quick disclaimer: I’m friends with Liz Weston so please keep that in mind when you read my review. Heck, if you look on page 13, she mentions Bargaineering as one of her favorite sites… so just know I’m biased because she’s awesome.

When I started the book, I thought it was a look at how money rules may have changed in the post-economic crisis new economy. It’s actually much broader than that. It’s really a book about sound personal finance techniques with consideration for how things have changed in the last five to ten years. The reality is that while money is still money, you didn’t have to be quite as persistent and diligent when the economy was going strong. You could overpay and overspend because the economic tide was always rising. Buy too much house and you’ll grow into it, with the value of the house growing along with it.

It’s different now and this book seeks to guide you through how your thinking must evolve in the “new economy” to take advantage of new tools you didn’t have ten or fifteen years ago. I think the best example of this is in Chapter 2: Create a Survival Plan with Cash and Credit.

• The Old-School Rules: Save for a rainy day.
• The Bubble Economy Rules: Who needs savings? Leverage to the max!
• The New Rules: Build both your cash savings and your access to credit for maximum financial flexibility in emergencies.

As you can see, there’s a little bit of simplification whenever you boil down such a large into into a one liner but the new rule is simply the next financial evolution of the old school rules. Saving for a rainy day is advice that can’t go wrong – you can never over-stress the importance of an emergency fund. If you save too much and have too large of a cushion, it can be financially inefficient but you’re never tempting disaster. If you want to get a little more efficient, then learn to leverage credit and access to credit, whether it’s a HELOC, a bank, social lending sites, selling possessions, or even family and friends. The key is identifying those sources before you are hit with an emergency (planning is best done when you aren’t freaking out!).

As you can see, it’s not your average personal finance book telling you that you need an emergency fund, how to get it started and all that. It provides all that and adds another layer of sophistication that is specifically designed for our post-credit crisis world.

Review: The 10 Commandments of Money by Liz Weston from personal finance blog Bargaineering.com.

I expected the book to be entirely about dividend investing, as the title seems to suggest, but I was pleasantly surprised to discover that it’s actually much broader than that. The book starts with a look at your household finances and a discussion on Rubillo’s Ten Step Plan to Financial Stability. The Ten Step plan establishes a strong financial foundation that you need before you look towards investing in anything, dividend stocks or otherwise. It moves on to discuss investing in more general terms, how to watch Wall Street, and then, Chapter 5, it gets into picking stocks.

So after all these chapters on personal finance and broader investing, you get to the namesake of the book – dividend investing (chapter 7). It’s part discussion of the merits of dividend investing (compounding returns, reinvesting) and part discussion of execution (checking dates, watching dividend growth), all written in very easy to understand language without the monotony of a million charts and tables that are outdated the moment they are printed (there are both charts and tables but they exist to illustrate a point).

Overall, the book is like a personal finance book that dovetails into dividend investing and how it can provide future wealth. When I picked it up, I expected it to be a book focused on dividend investing entirely, having seen “dividend millionaire” in the title. I liked that it was much more than that because without a solid financial base, you can’t successfully invest in anything.

You can’t get the book yet but when it comes out (it’s published by FT Press and comes out May 12, 2011), I’d definitely check it out if dividend investing is something you’re interested in.

Be a Dividend Millionaire by Paul Rubillo from personal finance blog Bargaineering.com.

David Bach’s most well known book is The Automatic Millionaire, which pushed the idea that the easiest way to “get rich” was to put it on autopilot. Automatic savings, whether to a bank account or a retirement account, is the key to a prosperous retirement. It’s one of the powerful pieces of personal finance out there. Since then, he’s written Start Over, Finish Rich which has spawned a whole “FinishRich” line of books, live events, and coaching.

In previous books, it was always about putting together a system that sets you up for the rest of your financial life. Set an automatic monthly contribution to your 401(k), check in each year to rebalance, and retire comfortably (that’s the skeleton, you have to put the meat on it by researching investments, etc.). This is one that focuses entirely on debt, how to pay it down faster, how to get out of it (from legally walking away to working with debt settlement companies), and how to stay away from accumulating more debt in the future.

DOLP Method

The chapter in the book that I think most debtors would find value in is Chapter Five: The DOLP Method: How to Pay Down Your Debt in Record Time and it’s a system that Bach has written about before. DOLP stands for Done On Last Payment and it establishes an entire framework for paying down your debt. You begin by collecting all of your debts to put into your DOLP worksheet. It’s really nothing but a list of accounts, balances, minimum monthly payments, due dates, and two figures called DOLP Number and DOLP Ranking. The DOLP Number is the balance divided by the minimum payment. The ranking is a ranking from smallest DOLP Number to largest. You pay the minimum on everything and then pay as much as you can on the highest ranking DOLP Ranking.

If this sounds a little like Dave Ramsey’s Debt Snowball, you’re close… this is a wrinkle on the idea. Instead of paying the lowest balance, which may have the highest DOLP ranking, you pay the one that can be paid off quickest with respect to minimum payments. A DOLP Number of 10 means you are 10 payments away from paying it off. As you can see, it’s close but not the same.

In summary, I think it’s a good book from an accomplished author and certainly worth a look (Google Books seems to have excerpts you can check out) if you are in debt and can’t figure out how to get out.

Debt Free for Life by David Bach from personal finance blog Bargaineering.com.

There’s one quote in the book that I think sums up why passive investing is a good idea: “Investment greats such as Warren Buffett, Peter Lynch, and David Swensen are all outspoken advocates for passive investing. In addition, the U.S. government’s Thrift Savings Plan (TSP) for federal employees has only passive investment options available for participants.” When you couple that with the statistics and research that Ferri has put into the book, it’s a combination of facts that become very difficult to refute if you want to advocate active investing.

It’s hard for me to have an opinion on the book because I’m already a big proponent of index investing. I’m a customer of Vanguard, I’m bought into the system of low cost index funds, and so this book isn’t designed for me. It’s preaching to the choir.

This book is for the scores of Americans who invest by way of active mutual funds with 1%+ expense ratios, sales loads, and scores of other fees that I never see. The books charts and technical analysis, while impressive, only cement the idea I already have in my mind.

So my charge to you is that if you don’t believe in passive investing, give this book a look. If you believe market experts can beat the market because of skill and not luck, despite the overwhelming evidence that they don’t; read this book and tell me if you still believe the same. If you do, I’d love to discuss it!

If you were interested in learning more about Rick Ferri, you can check out his website.

The Power of Passive Investing by Richard Ferri from personal finance blog Bargaineering.com.