Personal-finance

This book must have been written in 10 minutes. Many difficult topics are covered with one sentence explanantions, making the book worthless. I read the whole book in 15 minutes, in a room where I believe this book was written.

Bill Staton shows you how to say goodbye to the fund managers that cost you money each time they buy and sell in your mutual fund. Buy your own good stocks and hold them forever as Warren Buffett would tell you to do. Balance your portfolio each time you buy using Bill Staton's guidelines. A child can use this method, and Bill shows this it in some of his examples. Buy it and prosper.

Bill Staton's strategy is about as boring as the old Power Sweep of Lombardi's Green Bay, and USC's "Student Body Right" some decades ago...

It's also just as effective.

I have read more financial advice books than I care to count and this book was the one that finally made sense to me. I have been floundering around, investing here and there, without a feeling of actually knowing what I was doing. Mr. Staton's methods are a great comfort to new investors, especially those with limited funds. It takes the guesswork out of wondering whether you're investing in a solid company or one that will fold before you have a chance to make a profit. Mr. Staton lists hundreds of companies that have stood the test of time and you can feel comfortable investing in any one of them. I found his book to be easy to follow, with a lot of solid and practical advice. I feel as though I finally have a real investment plan. This book is a treat for long-term investors and for those who are new to the investing universe.

David Denby is a selfish man. He refers to his wife of nearly two decades as the "novelist Cathleen Schine" and hardly ever mentions his kids except as nuisances. His greeds leads him to the diabolical duo of Henry Blodget and Sam Waksal who then fleece Denby out of much of his life savings.

American Sucker is the work of a selfish, greedy self-obsessed man. The book is similarly awful. It is a waste of both your money and your reading time.

Having read a good but cautionary review when the book came out and having an interest in the topic, I waited for a copy at the local library. Good idea. Buying this book to learn something about investing would be like buying the stocks Denby chose to make money. At least the reader's intentions or motives would be a bit more rational. Denby apparently has watched too many movies and read too many great books. What he really needed was some good common sense.

The title is misleading. Denby's entire downfall is not based on his being "American" or a "sucker". Yes, he was greedy and willing to be gullible. He waxes eloquent on greed and envy. But these are besides the point. Yes, he listemed to precisely the wrong people. But his initial, critical, deadly mistake was to assume that he could make a million dollars in one year by not doing anything other than "invest". He was greedy, envious, naive, uninformed and lazy. He wanted so much to make that million that he ignored red flags, warning bells, and first-year business student advice on investing.

He has a cynical view of investing, based on Keynes' observations as to the risks involved. That pretty much explains how he thinks he can make a million in one year just by buying technology stocks in 2000. Denby also decides that taking risks means being irrational, that progress requires irrational behavior. What he fails to do is to listen even to the people who he indirectly accuses of having duped him; even Henry Blodgett told Denby to be more careful. Denby seems convinced that Alan Greenspan's effort to raise interest rates was the market's true undoing, This is a bad case of denial from the recent dot.com bust debacle.

Denby's self-absorption with his attempts to maintain his liberal, upscale, upper West Side lifestyle and apartment in the face of a pending divorce speaks volumes for his willingness to do incredibly foolish, shortsighted and greedy things makes this more of a lesson in how not to dissolve a marriage than any sort of morality play, note of sympathy, or tale of snake oil salesmen swindling a poor, innocent, well-read but naive movie critic. It is hard to feel sympathy, even for such a large, personal loss.

In terms of page count, "American Sucker" is about obsessions like money and real estate. But what is going on beneath the surface is something about the loss of family values. [Hey, hang in there with me for a minute--I promise I'm not for Bush.] What we have, at least on the surface, is a happy and successful family, an American success story, if perhaps more New York, upper-west-side literaryish than most. Was there a mid-life crisis? Sure, it happened back before "Great Books," when Denby's wife Cathleen Schine told him "...why don't you take your Columbia courses again?" Why? Because "I no longer knew what I knew." A few years later, "my wife...announced that she no longer wanted to be married to me." So Denby, already vulnerable, is left with "there is no there there;" rudderlessness; oblivion. Porn, suit-in-the-closet affair, foolish investing? He didn't kill himself--he wrote a book! He's a survivor.

I'm not all that up on the New York literary scene or the political correctness of women leaving men, but this strikes me as serious self-indulgence on the part of the wife. Schine's books don't exactly suggest that conventional marriages can endure. In "The Love Letter," the divorced heroine takes up with a younger man (the letter turns out to be from one woman character to another). I haven't read "She Is Me," but isn't it about a wife leaving her husband for a woman? See a pattern?

How does it go? "A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle." Denby should have seen it coming, but who knows what he could have done about it.

Sure, Denby wallows in self-interest and indulgence in this book; but his family is destroyed. Family values meant something to him. Too bad he couldn't figure out how to write about them in "American Sucker." It would have been a lot more interesting to me than the stock market stuff.

It should bother any thinking person that such an elaborate guide is needed just to go on living with some degree of assurance that the IRS isn't going to knock down your door and destroy your life.

You cannot learn all you need to know to master the tax code, for it cannot be mastered. The IRS doesn't understand it either, they depend on force to extract 1.7 trillion dollars from a public suffering from fear and ignorance.

If you want to really learn something, study the new book by Sheldon Richman "Your Money Or Your Life." It's revolutionary!

The American Express Tax Guide 1999 makes sense of the 1999 tax code, with clear, practical suggestions. I filled my copy with penciled notes and sticky tabs. It will definitely be my reference when I sit down to do my taxes. Plus, the price of the book itself is tax deductible, according to "Commonly Overlooked Deductions" # 47, page 642! ("Tax preparation fees [are deductible] including the cost of this book in the year that you bought it.")

This American Express tax guide is the best 1998 tax guide yet for "do it yourself" tax preparers. I find it easy to locate the help I need. The little tips and good ideas on each page really help. It's well worth the low price to get the forms and the explanations.