2million Personal Finance Blog, My Journey to Financial Freedom

Free Download of The Elements of Investing

Here is a link to a free download of The Elements of Investing by Burton Malkiel and Charles Ellis. Both authors have previously written well known investing books including A Random Walk Down Wall Street. I haven't read the book myself, but I have downloaded it for a future read.

Stop Acting Rich Book Review

Back when I was in college a department head gave me a copy of The Millionaire Next Door as a thank-you gift for a project I helped with. This book had a profound effect on me at the time and I eagerly digested the follow-on book The Millionaire Mind when it came out. When I heard the author was publishing another book "Stop Acting Rich" I was ready to dig in.

I felt that Stop Acting Rich was very much inline with The Millionaire Mind in reciting numerous survey results on profiling millionaires. The book appears intend to address why people often live what they believe is an affluent lifestyle that is above their means and how drastically different that is from those that are actually affluent

Some nuggets I took from the book:
-The most productive accumulators of wealth live in homes that represent a fraction on their net worth - the data reported in the book suggests averages of 4.6%-27% of their net worth in home value for those with $1mill+. This appears to be on par with my goal of buying a house that would represent ~10% of my target net worth. The reality is our home' value is currenlty roughly equal to 50% of our net worth. Yikes!
-Interesting statistic the median price of the typical bootle of wine purchased by roughly half of the millionaires surveyed was $13.09 for a bottle of wine.
-Millionaires median restaurant bill is $19.59 with 1 in 4 reporting paying $14.60 or less. I think my fie and I are pretty on par with this. While once every couple months we may go to a chain restaurent like Olive Garden with higher prices, most of our restaurent bills for the 2 of us are <$15 for the 2 of us after we take advantage of coupons, specials, and/or avoid alocohol.
-The most popular make of car among millionaires is Toyota.

Is it worth reading?
I felt most of the meat of the book was the results of the survey data. The authors personal anecdotes were of little benefit to me. I felt other than the survey data - that most of the book was more just more examples of why people live above or below their means.

Free Priority Club 300 Points

Here's a 5 question survery to earn an extra 300 Priority Club Point points @ http://usa-survey.priorityclub.com/mwpvwj . After answering the questions the points were immediately added to my account.

Found via slickdeals.

Example of An Investment at Fire Sale Price

If only we could find investments these days like this one Warren Buffet found with NAFI back in 1951. With so much financial information at everyone's fingertips today I think it makes opportunities like this a thing of the past - or at least the easy ones.

Earnings Per Share $29.02, Book value (liquidation value) per share $135.83 and the company's shares were trading around $23.50-$25 per share. I'm drooling....

Also Berkshire Hathaway Inc released Warren Buffet's 2009 Annual Letter to Shareholders recently. As always, a very valuable read from a very wise investor.