by Sandy Botkin and Matthew Botkin
Here’s an edited version of the review I posted on Amazon:
"Back in college, a popular drinking game was “Hi Bob”.
Everybody had their drink of choice and we all sat down to watch an old episode
of The Bob Newhart Show. Whenever somebody on the show said, “Hi Bob!”,
everybody drank up. The Botkins’ version of “Hi Bob” is the word “chuckled”. In
this book, Sandy chuckles, Matt chuckles, Sam chuckles, Jeff chuckles, Lori
chuckles, every gosh dang person in every information filled chapter chuckles.
That is to say, Sandy Botkin and his CFA son Matt have taken a lot of highly
useful information, broken it down into a bunch of scenarios and “discussions”
with various subject matter experts in wide-ranging areas of financial
expertise, and presented these dialogs as individual chapters in this book. (I
do not believe any of these were actual conversations recorded and written down
– far too contrived for that.) The information is sound, if a little basic, but
the dialog format is easy enough reading. They cover everything the typical
non-professional investor needs to know, from life insurance and mutual funds,
to saving for college and retirement, to mortgages and commodities, and
everything in between. It’s all, as I said, informative, important, and useful
information. It’s just that all that information is pushed along by a lot
of not-very-funny lines that end with somebody chuckling that drove me to drink
– just like Hi Bob – and made me subtract one mark from my rating."
I think book needed a little better editing and probably,
the authors should not have used the dialog format for every single chapter.
They would have done better to intersperse the dialogs more sparingly, perhaps
with something like: “In this chapter, we’re going to tell you a few more
things that Jeff taught us...” or something like that. Still, this is a good
beginner’s finance book.
