The Wealthy Barber
Posted by macengr on January 22, 2007
One of my long term goals is to leave a financial legacy for my descendents. As I’ve noted before, the future wasn’t in my planning until recently So I’ve had to do a lot of work on learning about finance.
It’s ridiculous that we don’t teach this in schools. Kids go out in the world never having learned much about saving for retirement, compund interest, and so on. And especially about philanthropy! So it looks like I’ll have to teach Number One Son how to do his own financial planning.
This year I have a number of books on finance set aside to read. One that I’d heard about but never read was “The Wealthy Barber” by David Chilton. I picked it up at the local library and gave it a read last week.
There’s a good, comprehensive review here at Getting Rich Slowly, but these are some of my takeaways:
- I need to upgrade my insurance
- Save 10% first IN ADDITION TO your retirement funds
- Don’t invest in penny stocks, ever
- It’s okay, if you’re doing the right things automatically, to spend your cash on things for you.
One thing the book didn’t discuss was giving. I’ll get into this more in a future post, but I often see 10% as the amount for giving. I need to do better at giving.
Anyway, I recommend this book. It’s a good basic description of a smart way to manage your finances. In the beginning of the book, it states that if you take 100 25-year old Americans, by the time they reach 65 1 will be rich, 4 will be financially independent, and the other 95 will be in trouble financially.
Be one of the 5!
Scott
Stingy Student said
I’m reading this now too, and although I’m not done yet, I would recommend it too for anyone who wants to gain a basic understanding of personal finance. Many books talk about investing, but I like this one because of its section on insurance policies, which I had never really thought about, but are important in financial planning.