It’s Not About The Money, Book Review
July 18, 2008 – 6:23 am
My wife and I took a ten day road trip recently to Indiana, and I took advantage of the time to catch up on my reading list. One of the books I had the priveledge to read was “It’s Not About the Money” by Brent Kessel. Brent builds his book on eight “archteypes”, or groups of people. Brent then spends a chapter on each group, and highlights strengths, weaknesses, and ways to balance out one archetype characteristics.
The eight groups include:
- The Guardian
- The Pleasure Seeker
- The Idealist
- The Saver
- The Star
- The Innocent
- The Caretaker
- The Empire Builder
The third part of the book covers the more traditional personal finance topics, but still with a archetype or behavioral finance slant. Such topics include passive/index investing, risk versus return, average market return statistics, etc.
I found this book to be fascinating in that I directly mirrored “The Saver” archetype. The core drivers of a Saver, according to the author, include a deep sense that frugality is one of the highest ideals, that you should never spend the principle of an investment, that you should live within (or below) your means, and the desire to pay off your house. A Saver also typically has either a strong desire to save more or reduce their current cost of living in order to feel more secure.
It seems that anxiety and security are key traits of a Saver, and that reducing one’s cost of live and/or saving more can temporarily reduce this need for security.
I recommend this book for those of you interested in why we do the things we do, or for those interested in behavioral finance in general. The book is well written and relatively concise if you skip over the archetypes that don’t apply to you at all.
| 2.5 |
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One Response to “It’s Not About The Money, Book Review”
Good book I read this as well. My opinion is that you can’t type cast your financial behavior. I feel that sometimes I’m a saver and other times a “Empire-Builder”. Good info however I would recommend it.
By
Rick Vaughn (Who am I?) on Jul 18, 2008