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Great For The Beginner and Checkup For The Experienced

Reviewed in the United States on March 4, 2009

Verified Purchase

For openers, the book is not only about investing but also about living a good and balanced life. For that alone it deserved kudos, but there is much more.

A number of other reviewers question how Natalie's "simplistic" approach can be valid when the investor must compete in a market filled with the best and the brightest ( or at least the most well compensated). Thankfully the market has given us the answer in that the wizards of Wall Street are capable of group think, greed and folly that would not pass the smell test among common people.

The next time you hear someone in a press conference or congressional hearing saying "nobody saw this coming" know that it is simply not true. Andrew Lahde predicted the financial meltdown from the collapse of the housing market to the financial crash with amazing accuracy (an built a highly successful fund), Prof. Cauley at UCLA repeatedly showed why the housing market had to crash in presentations to the financial world for a number of years and as we saw from the hearings one analyst took only a few hours to understand that Madoff was a fraud but could not get the SEC to act despite years of trying and overwhelming evidence.

Ms Pace's approach to a simple rating of companies produces results. Were I editing her work I would place even greater emphasis on the evaluation of the company culture and ethics. Is there strong, visionary leadership or a series of slash and burn execs armed with options and parachutes. How would Sun Tzu evaluate the management team? What would John Wooden say?

I was stunned to receive a note from Harvard that they had managed to loose 1/3 of their endowment, before the recent market selloff. With hundreds of world renowned professors of finance, economics, law and government how could the university walk into this ambush.

Ground level intelligence often has more common sense than that which comes from the "professional advisers". A year or so a former student noted that it was apparent that the housing boon had to end when tenants who could not make their blue collar apartment rent payments were moving into new houses. Those in residential sales understood that loan applications were being fabricated to meet lender criteria. Natalie encourages her readers to "deploy their sensors and to absorb the information available in our daily encounters and apply it to investing.

I appreciated that the book provides a roadmap which encourages the reader to begin a disciplined program of balanced investing through both the financial investments and investing in continuing education and exploration.

Finally the book is a fun and enthusiastic read. It's not the Bible of investing but a valuable framework and hopefully one which will motivate the reader to look further.

In the interest of full disclosure I have known Natalie Pace and her firm for a number of years.

JJM

A lighthouse in today's financial storm

Reviewed in the United States on January 1, 2009

Verified Purchase

Pace's book is highly recommended. She is a lighthouse in the current financial storm. More than just boring investment advice, this person actually gives advice on how to attain the "rich life". It reads quick, it's interesting, informative, easy to follow. Something for the novice as well as the expert. Also teaches how we can change the world by voting with our dollars.

Wall Street is a mess, main street is going broke. People have lost 30 to 50% (or more) of their investments and 401Ks in the last year. ITS TIME FOR CHANGE. The consciousness which got us into this mess cannot be the one which gets us out. The brokers, pundits, advisors, book authors, talking heads and TV shows that got us into this financial trouble, or failed to protect us from going over the edge, can't get us out of it either.

Natalie Pace's view of investing, wealth preservation and strategy for attaining the "rich life" is a NEW INVESTMENT CONSCIOUSNESS. Sure it has been made easy to read by the "rags to riches story", "number one stock picker" resume, etc., but the fact is all that stuff is just the sugar to help the pill go down. That pill is great investment common sense, which it seems isn't so common and apparently well needed.

Natalie has the common sense of Mark Twain and the female audacity and confidence of Annie Oakley. If you need to know she is a great stock picker or a poor mining girl from Arizona to have confidence in her advice, so be it, but the advice stands on its own. The wisdom stands on its own. Natalie's book is like Mozart's "The Magic Flute" or Chuck Berry's "Roll Over Beethoven"; I don't need to know how to read music, read the reviews, or be an industry expert in order to hum or dance.

This book was written for common folk, but would also be of value to experts as it includes the high level insights usually buried in the depths of spiritual philosophy and economics texts. Its is worth noting that the book has forwards written by Michael Beckwith (spiritual leader and author) as well as Dr. Gary Becker (Noble Prize winner in economics). With this book, something very different is going on, and something outside of the establishment's narrow-eyed, narrow-minded comfort zone.

Natalie's book is important to read because it is written by someone with a different view, a different approach and who will provide different results. I AM SICK OF THE OTHER STUFF. THE OTHER STUFF allowed $50 billion Ponzi schemes, government controlled financial institutions and a work force that probably has to work untill they are 80 to earn back their investment losses.

There are many ideas in this book which are worth while for either the novice or for the expert. Experts may not need the resume and the background included in the book, but I feel that material is important to make the financial advice and discussion more accessible and tangible to the general public, plus, it serves to motivate the reader to action. THE KEY POINTS FOR ME INCLUDE:

1) Investing benefits from common sense. That is available to all of us. YES, WE NEED TO HAVE THIS HAMMERED HOME. Look at a $50 billion Ponzi scheme. NO COMMON SENSE! Natalie gives us lots of ways to summon our common sense.

2) Your money can effect the change you want in the world. Its the "Law of Attraction" meets "Law of Action". Your dollars vote for the change you want. Many in the New Age spiritual area have been preaching that we we should be the "change you want to see". This book preaches to invest in the change you want to see, makes sense - common sense - but nobody else is saying this. You don't like war, pop-up ads, cigarettes, green dresses, whatever, don't invest in them, many do this unknowingly. You won't if you apply the principals of this book.

3) The "rich life" is more about "life" than "rich". Every other investment book aims to not make me "richer", they aim to make me more money. First, they apparently do that poorly, otherwise we all would have more money now, second, having more money is not the goal, a rich life is.

4) You can do it, its not magic. Sure there are many complicated ways to select and manage your investments, but if you can tell a good product from a bad product, you already have better information than some of the investment research which we get to read and which is most often positive, already dated (even if by minutes, that's enough) and written by research analysts too close to their companies to be objective.

5) Beware the fast talking brokers, pundits, etc. This may be obvious to experts, but it is by no means obvious to people who feel a tie and a business card is the badge of honesty and wisdom.

6) Diversify. Diversify, Diversify.

7) Don't pay unnecessary fees to middlemen that are sometimes rolling dice with your money. Buy ETFs. (The book explains what they are and why.)

8) Use a simple formula to manage your money related to your age so that you don't wind up unprepared for retirement.

9) Add good advisors to the mix (there are many), but not for all your money (diversify, diversify, diversify).

10) Spend money on yourself, your self improvement, your charities. This is vital and missing from any other investment book I have seen.

11) Use a report card and an analytical approach to discipline your investment decisions. This is also very valuable for investment clubs.

12 And finally, "BUY LOW, SELL HIGH". I saw this mocked in one of the other reviews, but as someone who has a background in economics and finance, I see this as a MINORITY BEHAVIOR. Common sense? Yes, but SENSE. The fact is that your mutual funds buy when they have money, sell when they get redemptions. People buy when they feel others are buying, sell when others are selling. This is all "buying high, selling low". We are a a social species, same as those buffalo that follow each other off cliffs when stampeding, we just do it with our money. Buy low, sell high, is the MOST IMPORTANT advice, after love your neighbor as thy self, for getting the rich life.

I give this book a "5" rating, not because it's Shakespearean in its impact (remember more Twain than Shakespeare), but to register its value among the pile of unfortunately displaced biofuel which I believe some portion of the other investment/wealth management books to be. They aggregate into white noise. Natalie Pace's book, sings from behind this noise and offers a modest proposal, a better way, the assumption that all investors are created equal, that they themselves have responsibility for the performance of their money and its translation into the rich life. Most importantly she provides a simple path to get started, in an easy read, with elements of the sophisticated mixed among the common wisdom.

If I had 3 books to bring to a desert island, I would include this one. It is fun and inspiring to read, plus I could enrich myself bartering and investing coconuts with the natives. Ah, now that would be the "rich life".

M. A.

Great information!

Reviewed in the United States on February 16, 2009

Verified Purchase

This book is easy to read and understand, and has invaluable information on how to build and protect wealth. Even an inexperienced person like me can grasp what she's talking about. I highly recommend this book.

Alcott Fan

Worth every penney!

Reviewed in the United States on January 30, 2009

Verified Purchase

I was looking for information and tips for evaluating stocks. When I found this book and began reading it I could not put it down. I found just what I was looking for and I feel that I can do this with the education I got from Natalie Pace's book. It was worth every penny I paid for it.

Diana J. Kelly

Two books by this woman are identical

Reviewed in the United States on December 16, 2012

Verified Purchase

Only the name of the books very. Inside the information is absulutely identical. I doubt that even a novice investor would learn anything new from either of the books.