Wednesday, June 23, 2021

Your Money or Your Life by Vicki Robin

This book’s full title is Your Money or Your Life: 9 Steps to Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Achieving Financial Independence. This is written by Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez with a forward by Mr. Money Mustache. Vicki Robin has her own website here.

It is a bit preachy but some ideas are worth stating. At one point she says if you have 10 dresses and felt you have nothing to wear – – the trill of getting is greater than the joy of having and using. But if you have ten dresses and have enjoyed waring all of them for years you are frugal (and happier). Waste lies not in the number of possessions but in the failure to enjoy them. Your success at being frugal is measured not by your penny-pinching but by your degree of enjoyment of the material world. (This is on pages 165 to 166 in my paperback).

I liked the attitude of no blame, no shame about dealing with the past. If you were foolish with money in the past, forget about that and only focus on what you will do in the future. What I do not find practical was advise to invest in real estate for renting. Personally, I rather invest in the stock market. You do not have to deal with people as you do if you have real estate for renting. I know people who have done this and they do have some horror stories.

I invest in companies in the stock market. You can get in trouble if you go after short term capital gains. This can be fine in a strong bull market, but you can lose big time in a bear market. I just ride out bear markets. I have good dividend paying stocks and they come back after each bear. During the bear, I still get dividends and every bear market I have been in, my overall dividends have increases. Of course, there are always companies that cut or suspend their dividends in a bear market. However, there are also companies that increase their dividends in a bear market.

There is a review by a blogger on Physician on Fire. There is a review by Mary Wisniewski on this personal finance site. There is another good review on Zen Habits.

See a money or your life summary by The Swedish Investor on YouTube. There is short and good review by Yath Prem on YouTube. Vicki Robin speaks at Microsoft Research. Vicki Robin also speaks on Detroit Public TV.

An index of the books I have reviewed are on my website at Books. I have three blogs. The first talks only about specific stocks and is called Investment Talk . The second one contains information on mostly investing and is called Investing Economics Mostly. My last blog is for my book reviews and it is called Non-Fiction Mostly. Follow me on Twitter.

Wednesday, June 9, 2021

The Beleaguered by Lynne Golding

This book’s full title is The Beleaguered: Beneath the Alders Series. Lynne Golding has a site here. Her twitter account is here with a twitter name of @lynne_golding.

This is a book I got from Ben McNally’s breakfasts with authors at the King Eddie. I very much enjoyed this book. You can learn about some Canadian History while reading about Jessie Stephens and her life in Brampton. The book is part fiction and part stories from the author’s Great Aunt Jessie. I learned a bit about what the World War I was like for Canadians. I had known that there were problems for people of Austrian and German descent.

Although my ancestors in Canada came from Switzerland, they spoken German and settle in the German community. They did not talk much about the World Wars but I know that they felt that they must learn English quickly and keep their heads down. My family came in the late 1800’s to Canada. It is my Great Grandparents that were the immigrants and they apparently only spoke German. My Grandfather and Grandmother were bilingual and my father (born in 1914) only spoke English. Although he learned to swear in German.

There are book reviews on Good Reads. There is a written interview with Lynne Golding at Open Book.

Lynne Golding speaks about this series on her site. Her Facebook page is here. She has a number of videos on her site.

An index of the books I have reviewed are on my website at Books. I have three blogs. The first talks only about specific stocks and is called Investment Talk . The second one contains information on mostly investing and is called Investing Economics Mostly. My last blog is for my book reviews and it is called Non-Fiction Mostly. Follow me on Twitter.

Friday, June 4, 2021

The Fate of the West by Bill Emmott

This book’s full title is The Fate of the West: The Battle to Save the World’s Most Successful Political Idea. Bill Emmott has his own site here. Click the 2050 index for an interesting overview.

He talks a lot of the problems of the west. People have lost faith in government. Europe is a mess. They have economic problems but also immigration problems and terrorism. It would seem to have a lot to do with new immigrants that UK voted to separate from the EU. He says that no rich country has revived or re-energized from economic or political torpor by a revision to authoritarian rule. Those that have achieved revival had done so through some new combination of openness and a restoration of equality.

He still has hope for the future of the west. I must admit I have hope but we are going through some tough times. You can see we have a problem with trust and there is a lot of polarization. Even in Canada we have people who intensely hate people of other political parties. It is not good that people have a hard time accepting an election when their political party is not the winner. I am hoping we will muddle through our problems somehow.

There is an interesting review on Kirkus Reviews. There is a review on Publishers Weekly. G. John Ikenberry reviews this book on Foreign Affairs. He also reviews The Retreat of Western Liberalism by Edward Luce. In closing he says “But, like Luce, Emmott doesn’t shed much light on the specifics of what would amount to a wholesale rethinking of the Western social contract”.

John Andrews interviews Bill Emmott on Project Syndicate . Financial News columnist David Wighton, and Christoph Winder from Der Standard joints in. Populism and the Fate of the West is debated on YouTube. The Speakers were Bill Emmott, Former Economist Editor-in-chief; Edward Luce, US columnist, Financial Times Joris Luyendijk, Investigative Journalist; and the Chair by Rowan Conway.

Bill Emmott is interviewed at Cambridge Union. This was not as interesting as the other interviews. They talked mostly of journalism. Bill Emmott and Kishore Mahbubani are interviewed at Ideas in Abu Dhabi. Kishore Mahbubani is Professor in the Practice of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore, where he also served as the Founding Dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy from 2004 to 2017. His book is “Has the West Lost It”.

An index of the books I have reviewed are on my website at Books. I have three blogs. The first talks only about specific stocks and is called Investment Talk . The second one contains information on mostly investing and is called Investing Economics Mostly. My last blog is for my book reviews and it is called Non-Fiction Mostly. Follow me on Twitter.