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    Pound Foolish: Exposing the Dark Side of the Personal Finance Industry
    Pound Foolish: Exposing the Dark Side of the Personal Finance Industry
    Pound Foolish: Exposing the Dark Side of the Personal Finance Industry
    Audiobook9 hours

    Pound Foolish: Exposing the Dark Side of the Personal Finance Industry

    Written by Helaine Olen

    Narrated by Lyn Landon

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    If you've ever bought a personal finance book, watched a TV show about stock picking, listened to a radio show about getting out of debt, or attended a seminar to help you plan for your retirement, you've probably heard some version of these quotes:

    “What's keeping you from being rich? In most cases, it is simply a lack of belief.” -SUZE ORMAN, The Courage to Be Rich
    “Are you latte-ing away your financial future?” -DAVID BACH, Smart Women Finish Rich
    “I know you're capable of picking winning stocks and holding on to them.” -JIM CRAMER, Mad Money

    They're common refrains among personal finance gurus. There's just one problem: those and many similar statements are false.

    For the past few decades, Americans have spent billions of dollars on personal finance products. As salaries have stagnated and companies have cut back on benefits, we've taken matters into our own hands, embracing the can-do attitude that if we're smart enough, we can overcome even daunting financial obstacles. But that's not true.

    In this meticulously reported and shocking audiobook, journalist and former financial columnist Helaine Olen goes behind the curtain of the personal finance industry to expose the myths, contradictions, and outright lies it has perpetuated. She shows how an industry that started as a response to the Great Depression morphed into a behemoth that thrives by selling us products and services that offer little if any help.

    Olen calls out some of the biggest names in the business, revealing how even the most respected gurus have engaged in dubious, even deceitful, practices-from accepting payments from banks and corporations in exchange for promoting certain prod­ucts to blaming the victims of economic catastrophe for their own financial misfortune. Pound Foolish also disproves many myths about spending and saving.

    Weaving together original reporting, interviews with experts, and studies from disciplines ranging from behavioral economics to retirement planning, Pound Foolish is a compassionate and compelling audioook that will change the way we think and talk about our money.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAscent Audio
    Release dateFeb 19, 2013
    ISBN9781469024073
    Pound Foolish: Exposing the Dark Side of the Personal Finance Industry

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    Reviews for Pound Foolish

    4/5

    63 ratings6 reviews

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    • 5/5
      This book is a much appreciated critical yet constructive commentary about finance gurus and concepts. Way better view than the woo woo and bashing concepts that have taken over the “best sellers” lists. Highly recommend this for people who are drained by why these financial gurus’ advice doesn’t seem to help much or stick. This book explains why, or at least why their advice and behavior is contradictory and predatory.
    • 5/5
      This book made me deeply uncomfortable in the best way. I love when books shift my thinking. I love learning about personal finance. This book has me rethinking that obsession, or at least choosing my sources better. We need better systems not just better individuals.
    • 4/5
      I am going to add this to my list of NF I recommend to people. Pre-library days, I briefly worked in various parts of the financial services industries and the story that Olen tells rings true with me. Read this as the first step in learning how to manage your financial life.
    • 5/5
      Before you make your next investment or meet with a financial adviser, I recommend you read this book first. The author also gave an excellent interview on C-Span Book TV. One of the most worthwhile finance books I have ever read.
    • 3/5
      For the second time today I’ll remind readers that I received this book as part of a GoodReads drawing. Despite that kind consideration which saved me upwards of $12, I give my candid feedback below.The simple premise of this little treatise is to tear everything you know about finance limb from limb. All the rot designed to help you with money from self-help to Dave Ramsey to the latest stock market guru is nothing but a fraud designed to get you to pay for something. Anybody who claims to know something you don’t is just selling something. There, now I’ve saved YOU $12.In greater seriousness, the author has a point and she very skillfully illuminates it for us. She methodically goes from one financial fad to the next and very neatly deconstructs them. She’s even polite enough to tear everything down and at the end NOT really present us with an answer. There are some liberal leanings in which she suggests that government regulation is the real answer to our problems but even that, she admits, isn’t a panacea.To summarize, since I have little else to say, Pound Foolish happily tells us all what we long ago suspected about the financial services industry. Nobody really knows the answer to how to get rich excepting through an inordinate amount of faith in straight up luck or perhaps getting your own talk show to sell your wares. The book is at times rather ponderous and redundant but ultimately informative with its most important take-away being the attitude of realism which accompanies it rather than any specific detail the author provides.
    • 5/5
      Depressing but important messages: you are not one latte a day away from financial security; the key things that make peoples’ savings insufficient and insecure are structural and can’t be fixed by individual self-management. People who tell you that there is an easy solution are selling something. Pensions have disappeared, replaced by uncertain stock investments (topped by fees that greatly cut into gains from saving); an annuity is unlikely to be a good idea for almost anyone, and even if it is, the people selling them will try to steer you into ones that are lucrative for them but not necessarily right for you, and it will be very hard for you to figure out what the costs and benefits are. Again and again, Olen emphasizes the importance of the overall economy; individuals can’t reliably escape just by being fiscally virtuous (for example, having a savings plan won’t do much good if you earn 77 cents on a man’s dollar and are also a primary caregiver for an elderly parent).