Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Freelance writer and former LA Times journalist for the Money Makeover series, Helaine Olen, has written a lively expose of the personal finance industry but if you are looking for advice on how to run your own finances, look elsewhere. A good story-teller and a little gossipy, Olen single-handedly takes on the likes of David Bach, Robert Kiyosaki, Suze Orman, Dave Ramsey, and many others, with a somewhat more balanced treatment of Sylvia Porter and Jane Bryant Quinn--not that more balance would save the first four from her expose' of their inconsistencies, platitudes, self-serving claims, hypocrisy, and sometimes outright lies. And at the same time, she has debunked some of their schemes and advice like investing in individual stocks, purchasing indexed annuities, giving up your lattes, thinking rich, investing in real estate, spending $3000 or more on get-rich seminars, and a lot more nonsense that passes as sound financial advice. By two-thirds of the way through this book, I was ready to cash in my 401(k), stuff in all in a Mason jar, and bury it in the back yard. Fortunately the ground was frozen by then. Some of the later chapters of the book take a somewhat different tack. Stereotypes of women supposedly incompetent as financial managers are exposed as the bigotry that they are in a still sexist society though she says it more nicely than that. She shows the futility of financial literacy curricula for school children as well as the trend toward financial therapy. She argues that there is a link between the rise in obesity and the increased impoverishment of many in the middle class--but neither causes the other. In fact, in the past few decades, there has been much greater income inequality with more people becoming relatively more impoverished while working longer hours (as long as they had jobs) while at the same time relying more on high calorie convenience foods. In the final chapter she recognizes that there are some structural issues within the American society and economy and that "personal finance can't do it all. . . . there is no personal finance or investment scheme that can fully protect us from the downward spirals or just plain ill luck." (p. 235). So where to from here? I hope that she uses her writing skill, dry sense of humor, and keen analytical ability to begin to point the way out of the present situation, and I look forward to her next book along this line.