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Best Personal Finance Books

Written by Nickel - 3 Comments

I just ran across a short blurb talking about the “Best Personal Finance Books” in the most recent issue of Bottom Line/Personal. They highlighted four recent books, none of which I’ve read. Here they are, along with their Amazon star ratings:

“Smart and Simple Financial Strategies for Busy People” by Jane Bryant Quinn (5 stars)
“The Only Guide to a Winning Bond Strategy You’ll Ever Need” by Larry Swedroe and Joe Hempen (4.5 stars)
“The Smartest Investment Book You’ll Ever Read” by Daniel Solin (3.5 stars)
“Inside the Economist’s Mind” by Paul Samuelson and William Barnett (5 stars)

Unfortunately, I don’t have much to add here… I’ve long since stopped reading personal finance books on a lark. While I’ll now read them for the purposes of writing a review, once you’ve read a few, there’s not much new under the sun. That being said, I’ve heard a lot of good things about the Jane Bryan Quinn book, and five star rating supports that. As far as the others go, I hadn’t actually heard of them before today. If anyone has read any of these, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

In the mean time, here are a couple of books that I can heartily recommend:

» “Time is Money” (my review)
» “The Bogleheads’ Guide to Investing” (my review)

Published on May 16th, 2007 - 3 Comments
Filed under: Miscellany

About the author: Nickel is the founder and editor-in-chief of this site. He's a thirty-something family man who has been writing about personal finance since 2005, and guess what? He's on Twitter!

3 Responses to “Best Personal Finance Books”

1
Chris Says:
May 16th, 2007 at 1:13 pm
I haven’t read any of them either. A couple I recommend are “Are you Being Seduced by Debt?” by John Cummuta. Look past the ‘program’ he sells and the book has a lot of great information. It’s a good read on the history of debt and our personal relationship with it. It also has a decent get-out-of-debt strategy.

For some fun budgeting/planning ideas I found “The Complete Cheapskate” by Mary Hunt to be very enjoyable. Also related to debt, I recommend “Born to Buy” by Juliet Schor, which looks at a generation of consumers. Materialistic overconsumption is a big factor in debt, after all.

Thanks for the other book reviews.
2
chris g Says:
May 17th, 2007 at 10:46 pm
I have listen The Richest Man in Babylon, this book was much easier to listen to than read, but I loved this book. I think readers who are just getting interested in finances could really benefit from this book.

chris
3
chris g Says:
May 17th, 2007 at 10:48 pm
Another good book I forgot is Good Debt Bad Debt…very good book on explaining the 100,000 luxury car and how buying used can save you in the future

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