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Pound Foolish: Exposing the Dark Side of the Personal Finance Industry, by Helaine Olen
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Review
“It's rare to come across a realistic and readable book about personal finance. Most are laden with rosy promises, followed by acronyms and turgid advice. Helaine Olen, a freelance journalist, offers an exception with Pound Foolish.... It’s a take-no-prisoners examination of the ways she says we have been scared, misled or bamboozled by those purporting to help us achieve financial security.”—The New York Times “Have you ever met anyone who has grown rich just by saving? Probably not. But you may well have met someone who has grown rich looking after other people’s savings. That dark secret lies at the heart of ‘Pound Foolish’, Helaine Olen’s excellent book, a contemptuous exposé of the American personal-finance industry.”—The Economist“A cautionary tale that you need to read.”—The Washington Post “Dishy dirt on the ‘financialization’ of American life and the hordes of carrion-pickers who swarm us in the hope of lifting still more dollars from our pockets.”—Kirkus “This thought-provoking book alerts us to important issues in today’s post-recession economy.”—Booklist“A highly readable antidote to the snake oil of the personal finance industry. Suze Orman, watch out!”—GREG CRITSER, author of Fat Land“Wow, does personal financial advice need debunking. And Helaine Olen does it like an old master. Clear, witty, takes no prisoners, and right as hell. Olen will wake you up. There is no financial trick to make you rich.”—JEFF MADRICK, author of The Age of Greed and senior fellow at the Roosevelt Institute“Helaine Olen explains in simple language why most Americans are never going to understand the myriad complexities of investing and borrowing, leaving us all vulnerable to being ripped off in oh so many ways. Combining thorough research with passionate writing, Pound Foolish tells us what to do to protect ourselves and our hard-earned money.”—DAVID CAY JOHNSTON, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Fine Print“As Helaine Olen shows in this powerful exposé, ‘personal finance’ is the ultimate oxymoron. The financial challenges that most Americans face are not simply personal—they reflect the failure of our polices and our leaders to tackle growing middle-class insecurity. And the advice that self-proclaimed money experts provide is far from sound finance. Too often, it’s snake oil that only adds to the problem.”—JACOB S. HACKER, director of the Institution for Social and Policy Studies, Yale University, and author of The Great Risk Shift“Pound Foolish is a fabulously well-reported, lucid, and witty tour of the train wreck that American finance has become. Olen has the rare ability to demystify the countless swindles and frauds that lately comprise the basic operations of the investment scene. As a kind of bonus, she depicts with verve and intelligence the panoramic freak show of personalities who infest the money scene.”—JAMES HOWARD KUNSTLER, author of The Geography of Nowhere and Too Much Magic“In this gripping account, Helaine Olen pulls out the rug from under the finance industry, and does so in time for at least some of us to find alternative solutions to financial security.”—DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF, author of Life Inc. and Present Shock “The world of personal finance is an economic sideshow filled with illusionists, conjurers, and snake-oil salesmen of every stripe. Thankfully, Helaine Olen has spent enough time inside the circus to be able to guide us wisely and wittily through the hall of mirrors—and come out smarter on the other end.”—JAMES LEDBETTER, opinion editor, Reuters, and author of Unwarranted Influence“The cult of ‘personal finance’ sells itself—and preys on pocketbooks—with a wildly false message: that American middle class families only have themselves to blame for their economic troubles. With wit, simple math, and relentless sleuthing, Helaine Olen shows how the personal finance industry has led savers and investors astray, and what you can do to avoid its traps.”—ALYSSA KATZ, author of Our Lot
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About the Author
HELAINE OLEN is a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Slate, Salon, Forbes, BusinessWeek, and elsewhere. She wrote and edited the popular Money Makeover series in the Los Angeles Times. She lives in New York City with her family. Follow her on Twitter at @helaineolen.
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Product details
Paperback: 304 pages
Publisher: Portfolio; Reprint edition (December 31, 2013)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 9781591846796
ISBN-13: 978-1591846796
ASIN: 159184679X
Product Dimensions:
5.5 x 0.8 x 8.4 inches
Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review:
3.7 out of 5 stars
227 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#202,340 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
A lot of the attitudes and advice I encountered in Suze Orman and Robert Kiyosaki's books just didn't smell right to me but I could never quite articulate why exactly. The good news is that Olen's work has saved me the trouble of debunking Orman and others myself. It Is thoroughly researched and thoughtfully argued and all together a compelling read. I just wish this book had done more to bring attention to how wealth and income inequality disproportionately affects ethnic minorities.
Very interesting book, highly recommended. We are being ripped off by the financial services industry and Helaine Olen explains how. She also explains how personal finance gurus like Suze Orman get rich blaming people for their own financial troubles. Your latte is not making you poor!
Financial journalist Helaine Olen is not very happy with the "personal finance" industry. "Personal finance" in this context includes all those who write (Suze Orman et al), advise (financial planners), entertain (Jim Cramer and his Mad Money screamfest), manage money (Fidelity and all the other fund managers) for individuals, and so forth. The idea is to build wealth for retirement, kids' college, buying a house -- in short, it's an industry that is central to the quality of people's material well-being. The short version of Olen's diagnosis of this industry's problem is that all these people are in it for the money AND that because they are in it for the money, they will steer you wrong and rob you blind if it serves their interests. OK, so how is that different than dealing with many other businesses, such as buying a car or selecting a cell phone provider? She doesn't actually directly answer that question in a comparative way, but she does suggest several possible reasons:1) finance is unusually complicated, and the industry tries to make things even more complicated by making their products "non-transparent" through contract fine print and financial babble;2) the time horizons are really long, and people are not good about making sacrifices now that may not pay off for years;3) financial markets are inherently chaotic and unpredictable, and so our human tendency is to search for comforting answers from witch doctors who claim to be able to predict the future;4) the game has been rigged because the industry controls such huge wealth -- vastly more than even such powerful industries as auto manufacturers and telecommunications companies -- that it uses that wealth to buy politicians and prevent effective regulation.5) we don't make good decisions when we're fearful and the economic tides are moving against us. Try being rational with every purchase decision when you're stressed by living paycheck to paycheck, your health costs are soaring, you can't afford to send your kids to college, you have no pension, and your income is lower now than it was 10 years ago.Needless to say, Olen does not have to look far for examples of how the industry does us wrong. Suze Orman blithely told her fans that real estate was the best investment they would ever make in their lives, and then when the housing crash occurred, said "Oops, I was wrong. But hey, I've got this new book you should buy." Managers of actively managed funds (as opposed to market index funds), on average under-perform the market, year after year -- but relentlessly promote their high-expense services just the same. 401K fund plans for employees offer high expenses combined with limited fund selection -- and the reason that employers choose such poor fund plan providers is that they offer cheaper plan administration fees to the employers themselves! And so it goes. If you have been following this stuff, you won't be shocked. If you have NOT been paying attention through the last couple of market crashes, you will indeed be shocked.So what's distinctive about the author's analysis that you will not hear from every other critic of the financial industry? For me, it was two things.First, she points out that the personal finance industry tries to lay the responsibility for financial failures and successes almost entirely at the feet of the individual. It's a case of a "moralizing minority" telling everyone else that it's their fault that, over the last 25 years in the US, private employer pensions have largely disappeared, median incomes have stagnated (and actually declined for the lowest fifth of the population), private health care and college tuition costs have grown at several times the rate of inflation, and wealth and income inequality has become the absolute worst in the developed world. Not only is there an elephant in the room, but the elephant has died and its rotting carcass is stinking up the entire neighborhood.But still the moralists have barely noticed. Instead, they point to the fact that too many people feel entitled to their daily Starbucks latte. Olen argues that having people give up lattes isn't going to solve the massive public policy fiascos that underlie these long-term trends in US society. This situation needs a collective solution. In the grand scheme of things, moral exhortation to individuals isn't going to make much of a difference. However, Olen does not devote much ink to informing the reader what kinds of public policy solutions she does think are required, let alone how to actually get them enacted.Second, Olen says that there is at best a very weak relationship between making people more informed about financial matters and having them actually make better decisions. Of course, the fact that people often seek their information from salespeople in the financial business is obviously a part of the problem. Conflict of interest seldom leads to happy outcomes. But there is an even bigger problem. People are people, and will continue to fall into all the emotional traps that human beings have always embraced. They will continue to fall for well-packaged hucksters like Jim Cramer and to stick with their long-time financial planner who has sold them the whole life insurance policy they don't need. They will continue to fearfully hold too much money in cash and invest too little in assets that can produce income and capital gains. They will continue to save too little for retirement. But isn't this just putting the blame back on the individual, the same "too many Starbucks lattes" fallacy that she debunked earlier? I don't think this is a contradiction with Olen's point #1. I believe it just makes it all the more obvious why it's the unusual individual who is able to overcome those larger forces. Knowledge alone isn't enough. It takes a lot of emotional self-control. More important (back to point #1), it takes collective action to solve a collective problem.
As Americans, we like to believe that we are holders of our own future selves completely, but we’re not. As much as we are individually responsible, when the nation and personal finance industry both work in their own best interests, what can the average Joe do to get by? This book doesn’t answer this question, but makes the reader aware that there’s something off. I’m a college student that will be graduating with less than 10k in loans; however I am likely to be primary caregiver to both my parents as they age. My mom, a homemaker and my dad, an accountant were hit badly in the 2008 recession and even a decade later haven’t made back the losses they incurred at the time. If I fall sick, or don’t get a good job after college, what happens then? I will be failed by the system, whether I wanted to admit to that fact or not.
The writer of the fine Trekonomics, Manu Saadia, pointed me to Olen’s work in a conversation (you can pick up that name, since I dropped it and am done using it). What this book is is a complete and thorough debunking of your favorite personal finance guru. Most are charlatans, it seems that the real question is to what degree are they charlatans.What I take away is that like some presidential candidates, what is being sold is not success per se, but the idea of success. Wrap yourself in the rich dad poor dad millionaire next door Jim Cramer etc mindset and you too can be rich. Having long been skeptical of people searching for gurus, Olen’s book is a breath of fresh air. What is missing is a bunking where the debunking went.Aside from don’t follow these fools, I was at least looking for something that might guide what I should look for - the best advice Olen claims to have found is to short the stocks that Cramer pumps, as well as buying TIPS. Even my well-worn advice of buying index funds comes under some scrutiny here, and I want a guru. Wait, I think I get it now.
I enjoyed the research and history in this book about personal finance and why it leaves us poor. Helaine Olen is up there with Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed. Unfortunately, I would have liked more of a personal story in this story about the evolution of the selling of personal finance to the american public. I appreciate that we all buy into the myth of Horatio Alger, but at the end of her book, she almost got it right. The fact is that we can't all be rich, and there is no mechanism out there--not education, not working for one company, not making a lot of investments, not buying a lot of houses, not doing the best you can as an entrepreneur and not pissing others off. The truth of the matter is, rich people want to keep their riches and will do any amount of smoke and mirrors to keep the inbalance working. There will be no bill, there will be no Yahoo site to make people rich. The owners of Amazon and Netflix are not altruists.
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