A useful financial-planning book that’s enhanced by the author’s personal experience.
A financial planner offers advice for managing a lifetime of wealth.
In this debut book, Stefanou draws on his work advising clients and his personal experience of helping his immigrant father to manage his finances in his later years. It offers readers a roadmap to investing responsibly, managing tax obligations, and using accumulated wealth for charitable or legacy purposes. The book’s title refers to the wealth of its target audience—people who have accumulated more than $1 million in investable assets, often concentrated in retirement accounts. The book guides readers on how to invest that wealth to preserve and maximize its value, as well as how to spend it responsibly and enjoyably, and pass it down to one’s heirs. Stefanou covers some familiar topics, such as how to balance growth and risk over the lifetime of a portfolio, minimize tax liability through legal means, and manage spending during retirement. The book also dedicates a chapter to the needs of business owners, arguing that they should diversify their investments beyond their own enterprises and recommending exit planning well in advance of retirement for a smooth sale or transition. Other chapters address less concrete aspects of financial planning, such as assessing personal and ethical values, deciding how to get the most enjoyment out of spending one’s available money, and anticipating and mitigating conflicts among heirs. Stefanou also advises readers on how to avoid financial scams and find a capable financial adviser. Each chapter concludes with “SWIM [Stefanou Wealth and Investment Management] Lessons,” combinations of summary and workbook exercises that guide readers through taking action on the topics covered.
The book provides a solid base of information, and it’s enhanced by the many anonymized stories that Stefanou shares from his clients’ adventures in saving, investing, and bequeathing inheritances. For instance, he explains the steps that he took to help a young man with a low salary minimize his income tax exposure. However, what makes the book unique is Stefanou’s inclusion of stories about his father, a Greek immigrant who lived frugally while working low-wage jobs and acquired enough capital to buy a rental property; he ended up with a portfolio worth more than $1 million, while continuing to work long hours into his later years. The author explains that the penny-pinching habits his dad practiced out of necessity were hard to shake when his financial situation was less precarious, and he takes readers through instances when he coached his father into occasionally spending some of his money. For instance, Stefanou encouraged his father to hire a builder to replace his porch, instead of doing it himself. “It was a fear of embracing and utilizing wealth because he felt like he needed permission to spend or else he was squandering money,” the author explains, and it took the combined effort of himself and his sister to help their father to overcome it. Such insights set this book apart from others in the genre. Throughout, Stefanou writes with empathy for his readers while offering advice that will guide them to responsible financial behavior.
A useful financial-planning book that’s enhanced by the author’s personal experience.Pub Date: April 15, 2025
ISBN: 9798891651777
Page Count: 218
Publisher: Streamline Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 10, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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