The latest book review here at Richer by the Day is Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and Stick You with the Bill) by David Cay Johnston.

Author David Cay Johnston followed a similar formula that brought success to Perfectly Legal when writing his next book, Free Lunch.  He again uses extensive research, a breadth of topics, and largely maintains political neutrality throughout Free Lunch, which explores the giveaways, tax breaks, and subsidies that are taking away from the majority to make the über-rich even more so.

Free Lunch covers more topics than time permits me to mention, though everything from Profession Sports Franchises to Eminent Domain, Title Insurance to Exploding Student Loan Debt and many topics in between were included.  Many titans of industry, including Buffet, Bush,

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 The latest book review here at Richer by the Day is Passion Saving by Rob Bennett.

Note to Readers: I was given a complimentary copy of the book by the author, but believe that my review was not influenced by the fact in any way.

Passion Saving is billed as an alternative to the way many of us traditionally try to save, which author Rob Bennett refers to as the Sacrifice Saving method.  He contends that the spending urge is simply too great to overcome.  Rather than fight this urge, we are supposed to redirect it towards saving to achieve more desirable results.  The goal is to transform saving into as emotionally satisfying experience as spending.  Passion Saving is basically about motivation.  If you can’t get motivated to save following traditional methods, then following the Passion Saving method

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The latest book review here at Richer by the Day is A Random Walk Down Wall Street by Burton Malkiel.

In this book, the author systematically disproves virtually all methods of predicting future stock performance.  He goes beyond discrediting both technical and fundamental analysis to include more exotic methods as well.  He shows how consistently beating the average return of the market is rare, if not impossible.  Mr. Malkiel presents a reasonable and believable case for efficient market theory.  Rather than prove that the market always sets the price correctly,

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The latest book review here at Richer by the Day is Your Money or Your Life by by Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin.

Your Money or Your Life is one of those classic personal finance books that everyone seems to have read. After finally getting around to reading it myself, I can see why it is so popular. While there are certainly some portions of the book which are outdated, the majority of the content is as relevant today as when the book was written in the early 90s.

One of the main concepts introduced in the book is how to define “enough.” I found this information particularly useful because I’ve been feeling guilty, or at least in the minority, that I don’t want any more than I already have. I’ve been living on the “enough” peak for a while now. Understanding that after a certain point having additional possessions

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The latest book review here at Richer by the Day is How Come That Idiot’s Rich and I’m Not? by Robert Shemin.

The author has always had trouble getting things right. He constantly made mistakes. As a result, he also got it wrong when trying to make the mistakes that hold people back from wealth. By understanding this double negative, backwards logic (he can’t even screw up right) he was able to rewrite the rules for success, which are oftentimes the complete opposite of the things we do when aiming for success.

Following his own advice to keep things simple, the simplicity of the philosophy is what makes it so powerful and achievable. Simplicity inspires focus

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My latest book review is for Perfectly Legal: The Covert Campaign To Rig Our Tax System To Benefit The Super Rich - And Cheat Everybody Else.

When I first heard that Perfectly Legal was written by someone who works for the New York Times, I was hesitant to waste my time, fearing that the book would have the same liberal bias that makes the paper hardly worth a glance. I was pleasantly surprised that author David Cay Johnston largely succeeded in presenting a balanced view of the issues surrounding the tax system. In fact, I only thought “what a load of crap” a few times throughout the book, and only yelled it out once. Even the sections with which I did not agree were valuable because they presented an alternative view and inspired consideration. I can imagine that the author would be open to debate the issues, giving respect to those with differing opinions. The entire book was well presented, well written, and seemed to present the issues in a completely unbiased manner.

I particularly enjoyed

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Predictably Irrational made economics entertaining in much the same way as Freakonomics. The fact that I enjoyed both of these books probably indicates my appreciation of behavioral economics in general. In Predictably Irrational, author Dan Ariely presents counter-intuitive theories and backs them up with very interesting experiments. He seems to have one of those jobs that appears more fun than what most of us do for a living.

What follows are quick overviews of each of the chapters. These overviews are not meant to trivialize the work presented but rather whet your appetite for a more thorough explanation.

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Freakonomics is a random and interesting look at the world through the eyes of a freak economist. I don’t mean freak in a bad way, just not “normal.” That’s the part that can take a potentially boring subject like economics and make it something that I would want to read.

The book is more a collection of random, well documented research, than a sequential stream of information building towards one unifying point. The takeaway is that looking at complex economical situations from new perspectives often shows the flaws in conventional wisdom and the results you expect the data to show. Each chapter is basically an example application of that theory.

Exploring seemingly meaningless questions like “Why do drug dealers still live with their moms” and

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I finished reading The Long Tail over the weekend. The name of the book comes from the increasing importance of the sum of products and services that sell in small numbers. It makes the case that because there are so many of them, adding up these little sales actually makes them more valuable then the small number of products that sell in huge numbers, i.e. the biggest hit is the sum of the non-hits.

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