Money Magic
An Economist's Secrets to More Money, Less Risk, and a Better Life
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3.7 • 15 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Increase your spending power, enhance your standard of living, and achieve financial independence with this “must-read” guide to money management (Jane Bryant Quinn).
Laurence Kotlikoff, one of our nation’s premier personal finance experts and coauthor of the New York Times bestseller Get What’s Yours: The Secrets to Maxing Out Your Social Security, harnesses the power of economics and advanced computation to deliver a host of spellbinding but simple money magic tricks that will transform your financial future.Each trick shares a basic ingredient for financial savvy based on economic common sense, not Wall Street snake oil. Money Magic offers a clear path to a richer, happier, and safer financial life. Whether you’re making education, career, marriage, lifestyle, housing, investment, retirement, or Social Security decisions, Kotlikoff provides a clear framework for readers of all ages and income levels to learn tricks like:
How to choose a career to maximize your lifetime earnings (hint: you may want to consider picking up a plunger instead of a stethoscope).How to buy a superior education on the cheap and graduate debt-free.Why it’s smarter to cash out your IRA to pay off your mortgage.Why delaying retirement for two years can reap dividends and how to lower your average lifetime tax bracket.
Money Magic’s most powerful act is transforming your financial thinking, explaining not just what to do, but why to do it. Get ready to discover the economics approach to financial planning—the fruit of a century’s worth of research by thousands of cloistered economic wizards whose now-accessible collective findings turn conventional financial advice on its head. Kotlikoff uses his soft heart, hard nose, dry wit, and flashing wand to cast a powerful spell, leaving you eager to accomplish what you formerly dreaded: financial planning.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Kotlikoff (Get What's Yours), an economics professor at Boston University, offers an accessible guide to sound financial decision-making based on the premise that "even the most responsible, prudent, financially well educated, and psychologically balanced people make major mistakes" when it comes to managing their finances. Every financial choice one makes impacts one's standard of living, he suggests, yet most people make such decisions without thinking through how doing so would affect their future. As a remedy, he presents his MaxiFi Planner program, which lays out how to calculate one's lifestyle cost, plus ways to improve one's living standard, and focuses on "simple and powerful ways to get more money without gambling your hard-wrought savings." Tips come for such tricky but critical life choices include deciding when to retire (plan with "the oldest age to which you could live" in mind), whether to borrow for college (don't, he advises), and how to navigate divorce (do "a cost-benefit divorce analysis"). He offers plenty of investment know-how, too, and ends with his top 50 "secrets" for financial security, including paying mortgages off as fast as possible and "when you get married, count on getting divorced" among them. Full of invaluable guidance, this is a must-read for anyone concerned about their financial future.
