Financial-future

As an attorney, I've read many books on estate planning and asset protection. Protecting Your Financial Future is the best treatment of the subject I've seen. It's got powerful info that even financial and legal professionals will learn from, but it's easily understood by the layperson too.

One of the best aspects of the book is its writing style. It was actually enjoyable to read; intermingling strategies with anecdotes that illustrate principles.

Living trusts and other asset protection tools are often used incorrectly. The authors of Protecting Your Financial Future help readers avoid common pitfalls and build wealth with strategies all my clients should use. I highly recommend this book to anyone who has a trust or thinks they will benefit from a trust. This book will give you the answers you need for the best possible plan.

This book is very readable and clear. It makes a potentially boring topic interesting and understandable. It is insightful and helps make the point that trusts are important for those with even just modest estates. It is a bit repetitious at times and contains a few too many personal stories, but it is otherwise motivating and a very useful guide for those unfamiliar with the legal world.

This is a simple, easy to read book about how to protect your money, savings and your assets. It reads like a novel with good stories, yet it has information like a reference book that you can easily refer to over and over again. I had never heard of the authors before, but when I found out it was a Time/Warner Book of the Month Club Selection, I decided to give it a try, and I'm glad I did. You will be too.

After recently retiring, I was looking for a book to help me deal with some of the financial and psychological issues that crop up in retirement. I heard a radio interview with the author of this book and immediately purchased a copy of it.

I found the author's advice to be extremely helpful, practical and easy to digest. Most chapters contain a "back to basics" section which will help people who need a primer on certain retirement planning topics. The author then moves forward with more sophisticated advice.

What I liked most was that the author recognizes that each of us has his or her own comfort level when it comes to investments. He also understands that the early years of retirement are stressful and sometimes require us to reinvent ourselves.

This book is simply written, easy-to-understand, and provides practical advice for everyone. The author recommends a realistic approach to investing that includes buying a diversified portfolio of index mutual funds. Other topics covered are investing in annuities ? fixed and variable, IRAs, and 401(k)s, and insurance (life, health, and disability).

Abromovitz, an attorney and financial educator, provides readers with a well-written explanation of the key components of developing, protecting, and rebuilding decimated retirement accounts. He recommends a pro-active hands-on retirement planning approach. In this 224-page, nineteen chapter book, Abromovitz covers how to make relatively safe investments that will continue to grow, how to plan for health issues and large medical bills, how to maximize your social security benefits, and how your financial safety can be improved by investing in stocks, real estate, annuities and 401(k)s.

There is no earth-shattering advice in this book. However, the author provides straightforward advice that can help individuals get and stay focused on the right track so that they can accomplish their retirement dreams.

Most individuals have not really thought about all aspects of the retirement process and have let the chips fall where they may. The devastating bear market of 2000-2002, unfortunately changed the retirement landscape for millions of individuals whose retirements have been postponed and many potential retirees have been forced to keep working to make ends meet. The reason for this was that most individuals did not understand or consider the risks of investing in the stock market.

By reading, studying, and implementing the wisdom in this book, readers will put the odds in their favor to obtain a secure and peaceful retirement. This book should be required reading by all individuals, whether or not they are approaching retirement since the advice provided will help all readers better manage their financial issues.

This book approximates the solution of one-factor and multi-factor PDEs that describe derivatives such as barrier options, convertible bonds, Asian options and credit derivatives.
Standard finite difference schemes are used. In particular, 3-point centred difference schemes approximate the derivatives in the S directions while Crank-Nicolson (averaging) is used to approximate the t derivative. Stability and convergence of the schemes are proved using the Lax Equivalence theoerem. Special attention is paid to resolving the, by now well known problems associated with the Crank Nicolson method. The workarounds are choosing smaller meshes near discontinuous boundaries, coordinate transformations and choosing the right sampling points.
The book is a good attempt (in my opinion) to show how to apply FDM in financial engineering applications. It is probably most useful for those who have already experience of FDM. It is NOT an introductory book.
Some of the criticisms are (this is why I give it a 3 star):

1. The von Neumann stability analyis technique is only applicable to constant coefficient, linear PDE. It is outdated, better methods being the maximum principle and viscosity solutions.

2. The discrete set of equations need to be solved by rather esoteric matrix solvers bacause the authors discretise a PDE in all directions. Using ADI or operator splitting instead lets us solve one-dimensional problem with Tridiagonal LU Decomposition.

3. A lot of detail on meshes has unfortunately been left out.

4. Using Crank Nicolson only aggrevates the problems in FDM schemes. There ARE better methods out there.

5. TYPOS!! for example, equation (4.13) on page 122. The S term is missing.

On the other hand, this book is aimed at real-life problems. However, extra detail needs to be added in my opinion in order to make it more accessible to a wider audience.

Reading this book produced three instances where previously encountered material was explained from a new and different point of view, the clouds parted, and I was bathed in the bright sunshine of understanding. Creation and valuation of hedging portfolios, reduced to their fundamentals, is now far less taxing to the memory. Explanations for the discretization of time and space now render previously mysterious numerical algorithms obvious in their intent. American options discused in a free boundry framework are far more intuitive than in the optimal stoping time approach. As much as I enjoyed the content, the occurence of numerous editing oversights was a considerable annoyance. This was even more surprising when I read the other customer review which indicated that one of the authors was an editor. Editors should be held to a higher standard and so I deducted an extra star!

Tavella and Randall have produced a compact, yet complete treatment of finite difference techniques in finance. I met Curt Randall in 1996 when his SciFinance software was in its infancy (though there is currently no connection between us). This software automatically generates C code to solve PDE's. That is an order of magnitude -- maybe two orders -- harder than just writing the code by hand. I inferred that Dr. Randall has a unique understanding of finite-difference methods for solving PDE's. For these reasons, I was very interested to see his book. For a more general treatment finite difference schemes, see Gordon Smith's 1986 book.

The mathematical motivations for all the techniques presented are given, with no wasted exposition. I liked the lucid analyses of stability, which many books in finance gloss over. I also liked the mention and partial analysis of a large set of solvers of sparse linear systems. having not followed the literature on jump processes in recent years, I was quite happy to see their treatment as well.

This book is all of what it claims to be, and no more. I do not recommend it as a textbook, or as a reference for those not already somewhat familiar with the subject, either from the mathematics side or the finance side. You will not get an explanation of what an eigenvalue or fourier transform is. The Lax Equivalence Theorem is cited, but not motivated or proven. No mention is given of when it might make more sense to use, say, a Monte Carlo scheme to find an option price. You won't find much economics in the book. But you will find a clear, correct, and useful analysis of more or less all aspects of finite difference schemes as they relate to solving contingent claims pricing problems.