MONEY FOR TOMORROW

A guide focused on gaining and keeping personal wealth.

Elkins-Hutten paints a financial picture that will be familiar to most of her readers: the middle- class idea of working, saving money, and investing in a retirement account. One of the many strong clarifications she issues throughout her book is that this standard process very often fails the people who rely on it. And even if it works, as she puts it, “You need your portfolio to grow every single year so you don’t end up losing money.” In these pages, she offers a great deal of better financial advice, drawn from her extensive experience as an investment educator. Her goal is to increase her readers’ financial literacy and get them to start thinking about their money the way wealthy people do. The key concept is to reach a point where active income (salary, savings) is being used to buy assets that will generate passive income—private equity, real estate, and so on. In brief, punchy chapters illustrated by graphics and bullet points and backed by data, Elkins-Hutten briskly teaches readers to anatomize their own financial status and lays out the many ways they can improve their finances, including unusual possibilities such as deferring a portion of their incomes (rolling it into some kind of long-term account) or even hiring their own children. “If your child is under eighteen,” she writes, “they can work for you in your real estate business and earn up to their standard deduction…before they have to pay taxes on income.” The author is clearly a seasoned pro at dispensing a wide range of hard financial facts. The book is written in the appealingly straightforward manner of a family financial adviser. Readers at any income level will find valuable counsel here.

A wide-ranging, authoritative, and worthwhile primer on improving one’s financial literacy.