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Financially Stupid People Are Everywhere: Don't Be One of Them
A hard-hitting look at achieving financial freedom by avoiding excessive borrowing and spending If you don't actively resist America's culture of debt, you'll end up precisely where the government, banks, and big business want you to indentured servitude. The mistakes people make with their money are basic, and avoidable, and unless you understand what they are, you're probably going to repeat them. What you need is someone who can shed light on the obstacles we face and show you how to avoid getting tripped up by them.Financially Stupid People Are Everywhere shows how society is rigged to take as much of your wealth as possible, and simple ways you can resist. It investigates, explains, and offers advice for all those who have fallen into debt, taken a second mortgage, been trapped by credit cards, or found themselves unable to get ahead.Discusses what you can do to stop the destructive cycle of borrowing and spending Illustrates the four major tenets of getting money right Highlights how to avoid the many ways that government, banks, and big business try to trap you with debt To secure your financial future, you must break the dangerous cycle of borrowing and spending, and learn how to guard your wealth against corporate ploys. Financially Stupid People Are Everywhere leads you down the only proven path to financial freedom.
224 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2010
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113 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews
May 21, 2013
I struggled with this book. A major theme of the book is that we are responsible for our own budgeting and debt-load, and it seems to imply that the problems of our economy are with the financial stupidity of much of the population. I get the idea of personal responsibility, but I struggle with his cynicism about government.
The author appears to put no faith at all in our ability to govern successfully, given that politicians have been effectively purchased by corporations and special interest lobbying. There is no consideration in the book about what efforts could be put in place to stem corporate influence on government and reclaim our country. Instead, he focuses on what individuals can do to manage their own financial houses.
He may be right, but it strikes me that there will always be people on the wrong end of the Bell curve that are ripe for financial plucking, and there must be a way to govern that protects these people from those on the other end of the curve, or from corporations that abuse their positions with financial influence?
The author appears to put no faith at all in our ability to govern successfully, given that politicians have been effectively purchased by corporations and special interest lobbying. There is no consideration in the book about what efforts could be put in place to stem corporate influence on government and reclaim our country. Instead, he focuses on what individuals can do to manage their own financial houses.
He may be right, but it strikes me that there will always be people on the wrong end of the Bell curve that are ripe for financial plucking, and there must be a way to govern that protects these people from those on the other end of the curve, or from corporations that abuse their positions with financial influence?
July 23, 2011
Rarely have I ever come away from a book like this and been so put off with an author. This guy has some pretty sound ideas on ways that one can live a good financial life and what is wrong with the way most people manage their money. He also has some good reasoning behind some of his thoughts on problems with our society and government that encourage these bad financial decisions.
That said, the author comes off in this book as a rude, obnoxious, grump that doesn't even try to hid is contempt and dislike for anyone that doesn't have there financial lives in order. There were parts of the book that I just skipped in the middle where the his diatribe was just too much.
There are other books out there with this kind of sound financial advice that are better and more readable than this one. Go find one of them.
That said, the author comes off in this book as a rude, obnoxious, grump that doesn't even try to hid is contempt and dislike for anyone that doesn't have there financial lives in order. There were parts of the book that I just skipped in the middle where the his diatribe was just too much.
There are other books out there with this kind of sound financial advice that are better and more readable than this one. Go find one of them.
October 25, 2016
What I liked about the book:
1. I found no typos or grammatical errors in the entire book. I'm a fairly good proofreader, and I usually find errors when I read a book of this length. If nothing else, the book seems to be extremely well-edited on the level of words and sentences.
2. Jason Kelly pretty much confirms what has been obvious to me as far back as I can remember: the financial benefits of frugal living. I've never been able to comprehend how anyone - indeed, practically everyone - can view buying on credit as anything other than an undesirable last option. In part this may be due to my generally pessimistic view of life. I'm aware of the vast number of things that can potentially go wrong, so I always want a buffer.
3. I learned a few more details about the shenanigans of our gilded overlords, but nothing too surprising to anyone who has paid much attention.
What I neither liked nor disliked:
1. Other reviewers express discomfort with Kelly's scolding language ("debt dopes," "financially stupid people," etc.). I am neutral on it. On the one hand, it's all basically true, which is why it bothers some people (few people could be bothered by an obviously unconvincing attempt to insult them, such as trying to ridicule Bill Gates for being poor). But on the other hand, is it optimally effective? In some circumstances, harsh language can be motivating (see the basic training of every military organization on the planet), and maybe it works on some readers. For readers who want something sweeter and more politically correct, there are shelves of softer books on the market.
1.a. Although Kelly may not be aware of the relevant psychological theory, he is probably recruiting the emotion of disgust to moralize against loose financial living. (For background, see: Yuck!: The Nature and Moral Significance of Disgust and Rozin, Paul, Maureen Markwith, and Caryn Stoess. "Moralization and becoming a vegetarian: The transformation of preferences into values and the recruitment of disgust." Psychological Science 8, no. 2 (1997): 67-73.)
Brain-scanning experiments have found that the same part of the human brain is involved both in generating sensations of disgust (for example, to the smell of feces or rotting flesh) and in making moral judgments. Disgust is an ancient emotion that evolved in our pre-human ancestors long before they developed the cognitive capacity and social complexity to begin making moral judgments. Evolution often involves re-purposing previously evolved traits. The same mental circuits that generated sensations of disgust to protect our ancestors from poisons and parasites mapped over to protecting us from abstract moral threats. Think of moral disgust as a force that can sometimes take the fun out of otherwise pleasurable actions that do harm to other people, to the environment, or to one's future self. For example, meat tastes good, so to a pure hedonist, eating meat is an unambiguous moral good. But to someone who recognizes the harm that eating meat causes, the sense of moral disgust at personally causing such harm can override the pleasure that eating meat provides to the consumer. The moral vegan's brain effectively rewires itself to respond to meat as an ordinary person responds to rotten meat.
The application to financial responsibility is obvious. Shopping provides hedonic rewards similar to many other vices. Shopping on credit amplifies these rewards in the short run, because it feels less like spending money. Most people view spending actual money through the lens of loss aversion, so the consumption industry needs to make shopping feel less like spending your own money. Enter the credit card. However, as Kelly spends of much of the book explaining, buying on credit merely delays and then amplifies the pain of spending. One way to combat the financial industry's psychological treachery is to arm yourself with psychology. Recruiting the emotion of disgust at the stupidity of falling into the credit trap can override the hedonic rewards from getting "shiny objects" at seemingly no cost. I believe that is what Kelly is doing in the following passage:
Our natural tendency to mock and disdain foolish people who allow themselves to be victimized can be our defense mechanism against falling victim similarly. Physical comedy never gets old. By laughing at the unwary person who slips on the banana peel, we may learn to watch our step. This defense mechanism has recently become the target of political correctness, a movement aimed at censoring all speech which might offend or disadvantage any particular group of people in society. The disdain we need to feel for the credit trap, to resist its tempting siren song, could easily map onto disdain for those people who fall into it, thereby dehumanizing and alienating them. Navigating this tightrope requires some tough love: hate the sin, love the sinner.
What I didn't like about the book:
1. It's two rather different books that don't fit together all that comfortably: a practical self-help book and a political screed. The practical advice is all potentially useful to the reader, whereas the political commentary is about stuff that is largely beyond the typical reader's spheres of relevance and influence. Yes, it's dreadful how lobbyists buy politicians and conspire to screw the financially stupid little guys, but once the little guy has taken that into account there's little more to be said about it. You just follow your philosophy of Stoic self-denial and sock away the savings. The book could be stronger with a little less focus on abstract politics and more details of self-help. Or split it into two separate books to eliminate the jumping back and forth.
2. Citing Ron Paul, M.D. as an authority on anything other than medicine. I'm not an expert on all the economic arguments about Ron Paul's favorite whipping boy, the Federal Reserve, but I do know enough about climate science to know that Paul discredits himself completely with his science denial. As a libertarian, Paul has to deny climate science because the facts contradict his pre-scientific ideology. Libertarians generally pretend negative externalities do not exist, but man-made climate change is the largest negative externality humans have yet created. For libertarian philosophy to work, Earth must be infinite in its capacity to provide resources and absorb our wastes. Paul could still have valuable insight about, say, the topic of banking despite his utter incompetence and dishonesty about the topic of climate science, but Kelly doesn't even acknowledge this glaring red flag or give us any reason to believe Paul's scientific lapse doesn't infect his thinking generally. Given that climate science denial amounts to promoting mass murder, I deducted one star for this.
3. Kelly's inadequate coverage of frugal living, and failure to cite additional reading. Kelly rightly points out that controlling one's spending is critical to financial success, but vast numbers of people seem to find this extremely hard to do. I'd guess they might need a little more than a scolding. There are shelves of books about ways to save money and manage personal finances, so Kelly doesn't need to rewrite them all, but at least he should acknowledge they exist. No book is ever so great that it can pretend to be the only book a person needs to read.
4. A glaring contradiction: in chapter 6, Kelly writes:
Later in the Conclusion, Kelly explicitly states that he wrote his book to change the behavior of others:
If there is nothing you can do to change the behavior of others, why write a self-help book? The ostensible point of writing self-help books is to change other people. Kelly needs to walk back his defeatist hyperbole just a bit and acknowledge reality: sure, you can't instantly change everybody's mind on every topic in all the ways you might want, but people do change deeply held beliefs on occasion. At any given moment, some fraction of people in the world are experiencing teachable moments, in which they are open to new ideas. Some of them might be picking up self-help books right now. Kelly must know this is true; otherwise he'd just be shouting ineffectually into the wind.
Or just recall the past several decades and the drastic social changes that have occurred. Not long ago, gay marriage was unthinkable. As were tattoos for most people. Young people in America are abandoning religion at an impressive rate. Such large changes do not happen by accident - they are the result of some people arguing for change and winning those arguments. See The Long Reach of Reason and A Manual for Creating Atheists for more about the art of persuasion.
5. Kelly offers an alliterative list of three "C"s which have huge financial implications for many people living in the USA and other developed nations: Credit, Cars, and Castles. Presumably he wants to keep his list as short as possible, but how could he omit the fourth C which could top them all? Children. The choice to create a child is one of the most financially (and environmentally) consequential decisions a person can make. On average, a child born in the USA in 2013 costs his or her parents about a quarter-million dollars in direct expenses to age 18, not counting college costs or any support after that age. If you add in the opportunity costs (such as the forgone yields from investing the same money, the lower career earnings of a mother vs. her childless woman counterpart, etc.), the economic child crater swells to somewhere from $600,000 to over $2 million. This is not a reason not to have a child, but at the very least anyone contemplating parenthood needs to be aware of its eye-watering cost, just as we need to be aware of the costs of buying on credit. Who would buy any other product without checking the price tag first?
6. And speaking of Kelly's three "C"s, he barely touches on the possibility and benefits of living car-free. Neither does he say much about driving less if you do own a car. Drive it half as far each year, and it should last about twice as many years before you pay the depreciation cost on the replacement car. Reduce your driving need to just a few times per month, and car-sharing or Uber may work out to be cheaper than owning.
Driving not only costs money directly, but it multiplies other forms of spending. If you don't own a car, getting to the store and lugging items home is probably harder. Therefore you think more about what you buy. If you shop online, then you have additional ways to inhibit your spending, such as the customer reviews on Amazon.com. Before buying any product, make sure it has dozens of reviews, including at least a few negative ones. Customer reviews can be a powerful antidote to corporate advertising (which is totally slanted at making you want to buy). The more time you spend reading about an item, the longer you take to actually buy it, and the less likely you are to regret your purchase. You'll have a much better idea of whether a product will work for you. Sure, corporations can try to plant fake positive reviews, but they can't censor all their customers. When people feel burned by a bad purchase, they want to hit back, so we can all benefit.
Another downside of car ownership: the more you drive, the fatter you tend to get. Overweight and obesity are leading causes of preventable death, and can bring a whole list of chronic health problems with financial consequences.
Automobiles kill tens of thousands of people each year in the USA, and maim and injure many times more. For otherwise law-abiding people, driving creates their greatest opportunity for unpleasant encounters with law enforcement and the legal system. One little mistake while driving may have devastating financial consequences - loss of employment, loss of freedom, financial losses not covered by insurance, etc.
Where a person chooses to live largely determines their need for travel, and its mode, for decades to come. Live in a sprawling, car-dependent community and you build in the requirement for tens of thousands of miles of risky, expensive future driving - with no guarantee that fossil fuel will continue to be available at a price you can handle. In contrast, a walkable, bikeable community with public transit and most necessities nearby makes it much easier to live car-free or car-lite. Thus even if the walkable community seems more expensive up front, the "cheaper" home values in the sprawling community may represent a false economy.
1. I found no typos or grammatical errors in the entire book. I'm a fairly good proofreader, and I usually find errors when I read a book of this length. If nothing else, the book seems to be extremely well-edited on the level of words and sentences.
2. Jason Kelly pretty much confirms what has been obvious to me as far back as I can remember: the financial benefits of frugal living. I've never been able to comprehend how anyone - indeed, practically everyone - can view buying on credit as anything other than an undesirable last option. In part this may be due to my generally pessimistic view of life. I'm aware of the vast number of things that can potentially go wrong, so I always want a buffer.
3. I learned a few more details about the shenanigans of our gilded overlords, but nothing too surprising to anyone who has paid much attention.
What I neither liked nor disliked:
1. Other reviewers express discomfort with Kelly's scolding language ("debt dopes," "financially stupid people," etc.). I am neutral on it. On the one hand, it's all basically true, which is why it bothers some people (few people could be bothered by an obviously unconvincing attempt to insult them, such as trying to ridicule Bill Gates for being poor). But on the other hand, is it optimally effective? In some circumstances, harsh language can be motivating (see the basic training of every military organization on the planet), and maybe it works on some readers. For readers who want something sweeter and more politically correct, there are shelves of softer books on the market.
1.a. Although Kelly may not be aware of the relevant psychological theory, he is probably recruiting the emotion of disgust to moralize against loose financial living. (For background, see: Yuck!: The Nature and Moral Significance of Disgust and Rozin, Paul, Maureen Markwith, and Caryn Stoess. "Moralization and becoming a vegetarian: The transformation of preferences into values and the recruitment of disgust." Psychological Science 8, no. 2 (1997): 67-73.)
Brain-scanning experiments have found that the same part of the human brain is involved both in generating sensations of disgust (for example, to the smell of feces or rotting flesh) and in making moral judgments. Disgust is an ancient emotion that evolved in our pre-human ancestors long before they developed the cognitive capacity and social complexity to begin making moral judgments. Evolution often involves re-purposing previously evolved traits. The same mental circuits that generated sensations of disgust to protect our ancestors from poisons and parasites mapped over to protecting us from abstract moral threats. Think of moral disgust as a force that can sometimes take the fun out of otherwise pleasurable actions that do harm to other people, to the environment, or to one's future self. For example, meat tastes good, so to a pure hedonist, eating meat is an unambiguous moral good. But to someone who recognizes the harm that eating meat causes, the sense of moral disgust at personally causing such harm can override the pleasure that eating meat provides to the consumer. The moral vegan's brain effectively rewires itself to respond to meat as an ordinary person responds to rotten meat.
The application to financial responsibility is obvious. Shopping provides hedonic rewards similar to many other vices. Shopping on credit amplifies these rewards in the short run, because it feels less like spending money. Most people view spending actual money through the lens of loss aversion, so the consumption industry needs to make shopping feel less like spending your own money. Enter the credit card. However, as Kelly spends of much of the book explaining, buying on credit merely delays and then amplifies the pain of spending. One way to combat the financial industry's psychological treachery is to arm yourself with psychology. Recruiting the emotion of disgust at the stupidity of falling into the credit trap can override the hedonic rewards from getting "shiny objects" at seemingly no cost. I believe that is what Kelly is doing in the following passage:
If you ever want to know how predictably stupid most people are and how smart people are onto them, attend a product-and-marketing meeting. Companies that make and sell shiny objects know what they’re doing, and they consider the average consumer to be a complete dope. I once joined a meeting at an electronics manufacturer where a manager asked if people would really buy a big-screen TV model as big and expensive as the one discussed that day. “Sure,” said an executive, “just show a celebrity using it and break the price into 60 monthly payments that don’t begin for six months, and they’ll buy anything.” Everybody laughed and nodded, because he was right.
Our natural tendency to mock and disdain foolish people who allow themselves to be victimized can be our defense mechanism against falling victim similarly. Physical comedy never gets old. By laughing at the unwary person who slips on the banana peel, we may learn to watch our step. This defense mechanism has recently become the target of political correctness, a movement aimed at censoring all speech which might offend or disadvantage any particular group of people in society. The disdain we need to feel for the credit trap, to resist its tempting siren song, could easily map onto disdain for those people who fall into it, thereby dehumanizing and alienating them. Navigating this tightrope requires some tough love: hate the sin, love the sinner.
What I didn't like about the book:
1. It's two rather different books that don't fit together all that comfortably: a practical self-help book and a political screed. The practical advice is all potentially useful to the reader, whereas the political commentary is about stuff that is largely beyond the typical reader's spheres of relevance and influence. Yes, it's dreadful how lobbyists buy politicians and conspire to screw the financially stupid little guys, but once the little guy has taken that into account there's little more to be said about it. You just follow your philosophy of Stoic self-denial and sock away the savings. The book could be stronger with a little less focus on abstract politics and more details of self-help. Or split it into two separate books to eliminate the jumping back and forth.
2. Citing Ron Paul, M.D. as an authority on anything other than medicine. I'm not an expert on all the economic arguments about Ron Paul's favorite whipping boy, the Federal Reserve, but I do know enough about climate science to know that Paul discredits himself completely with his science denial. As a libertarian, Paul has to deny climate science because the facts contradict his pre-scientific ideology. Libertarians generally pretend negative externalities do not exist, but man-made climate change is the largest negative externality humans have yet created. For libertarian philosophy to work, Earth must be infinite in its capacity to provide resources and absorb our wastes. Paul could still have valuable insight about, say, the topic of banking despite his utter incompetence and dishonesty about the topic of climate science, but Kelly doesn't even acknowledge this glaring red flag or give us any reason to believe Paul's scientific lapse doesn't infect his thinking generally. Given that climate science denial amounts to promoting mass murder, I deducted one star for this.
3. Kelly's inadequate coverage of frugal living, and failure to cite additional reading. Kelly rightly points out that controlling one's spending is critical to financial success, but vast numbers of people seem to find this extremely hard to do. I'd guess they might need a little more than a scolding. There are shelves of books about ways to save money and manage personal finances, so Kelly doesn't need to rewrite them all, but at least he should acknowledge they exist. No book is ever so great that it can pretend to be the only book a person needs to read.
4. A glaring contradiction: in chapter 6, Kelly writes:
"There's nothing you can do to change the behavior of others. You can change only your behavior and guarantee yourself alone a life of financial freedom that makes the nation stronger."
Later in the Conclusion, Kelly explicitly states that he wrote his book to change the behavior of others:
"You might have found this book rude in parts, but it had to be. Other financial writers and I have written politely and thoroughly on this subject for years — to no avail. The mindless consumption continued, lending and borrowing entered Wonderland when debtors didn't even need to prove their ability to repay, and the entire economy caught fire because of it. Tough times call for tough medicine, so writing the same prudent 400 tips for financial health in the same gentle tones wouldn't cut it. Nobody followed these tips before; why would they now? A smack upside the head was in order, and this book is it. It's short enough to cover all that matters, and it punches hard and straight in hopes of finally knocking some sense into a few noggins."
If there is nothing you can do to change the behavior of others, why write a self-help book? The ostensible point of writing self-help books is to change other people. Kelly needs to walk back his defeatist hyperbole just a bit and acknowledge reality: sure, you can't instantly change everybody's mind on every topic in all the ways you might want, but people do change deeply held beliefs on occasion. At any given moment, some fraction of people in the world are experiencing teachable moments, in which they are open to new ideas. Some of them might be picking up self-help books right now. Kelly must know this is true; otherwise he'd just be shouting ineffectually into the wind.
Or just recall the past several decades and the drastic social changes that have occurred. Not long ago, gay marriage was unthinkable. As were tattoos for most people. Young people in America are abandoning religion at an impressive rate. Such large changes do not happen by accident - they are the result of some people arguing for change and winning those arguments. See The Long Reach of Reason and A Manual for Creating Atheists for more about the art of persuasion.
5. Kelly offers an alliterative list of three "C"s which have huge financial implications for many people living in the USA and other developed nations: Credit, Cars, and Castles. Presumably he wants to keep his list as short as possible, but how could he omit the fourth C which could top them all? Children. The choice to create a child is one of the most financially (and environmentally) consequential decisions a person can make. On average, a child born in the USA in 2013 costs his or her parents about a quarter-million dollars in direct expenses to age 18, not counting college costs or any support after that age. If you add in the opportunity costs (such as the forgone yields from investing the same money, the lower career earnings of a mother vs. her childless woman counterpart, etc.), the economic child crater swells to somewhere from $600,000 to over $2 million. This is not a reason not to have a child, but at the very least anyone contemplating parenthood needs to be aware of its eye-watering cost, just as we need to be aware of the costs of buying on credit. Who would buy any other product without checking the price tag first?
6. And speaking of Kelly's three "C"s, he barely touches on the possibility and benefits of living car-free. Neither does he say much about driving less if you do own a car. Drive it half as far each year, and it should last about twice as many years before you pay the depreciation cost on the replacement car. Reduce your driving need to just a few times per month, and car-sharing or Uber may work out to be cheaper than owning.
Driving not only costs money directly, but it multiplies other forms of spending. If you don't own a car, getting to the store and lugging items home is probably harder. Therefore you think more about what you buy. If you shop online, then you have additional ways to inhibit your spending, such as the customer reviews on Amazon.com. Before buying any product, make sure it has dozens of reviews, including at least a few negative ones. Customer reviews can be a powerful antidote to corporate advertising (which is totally slanted at making you want to buy). The more time you spend reading about an item, the longer you take to actually buy it, and the less likely you are to regret your purchase. You'll have a much better idea of whether a product will work for you. Sure, corporations can try to plant fake positive reviews, but they can't censor all their customers. When people feel burned by a bad purchase, they want to hit back, so we can all benefit.
Another downside of car ownership: the more you drive, the fatter you tend to get. Overweight and obesity are leading causes of preventable death, and can bring a whole list of chronic health problems with financial consequences.
Automobiles kill tens of thousands of people each year in the USA, and maim and injure many times more. For otherwise law-abiding people, driving creates their greatest opportunity for unpleasant encounters with law enforcement and the legal system. One little mistake while driving may have devastating financial consequences - loss of employment, loss of freedom, financial losses not covered by insurance, etc.
Where a person chooses to live largely determines their need for travel, and its mode, for decades to come. Live in a sprawling, car-dependent community and you build in the requirement for tens of thousands of miles of risky, expensive future driving - with no guarantee that fossil fuel will continue to be available at a price you can handle. In contrast, a walkable, bikeable community with public transit and most necessities nearby makes it much easier to live car-free or car-lite. Thus even if the walkable community seems more expensive up front, the "cheaper" home values in the sprawling community may represent a false economy.
March 11, 2016
As the title suggests, Financially Stupid People are Everywhere, Don't Be One of Them, written by Jason Kelly, is a harsh, yet truthful exploration into the world of financial stupidity and America's debt-based economy. It offers practical advice regarding how to fight back against corrupt government, big banks, and corporate giants who conspire together to empty the pockets of so-called debt dopes. Fighting back starts with "the First Rule of Finance" which is to live within your means by spending no more than 80% of your take-home pay. Also, controlling the 3 C's (credit, cars, and castles). If a person can do these simple things, he or she can know true wealth. True wealth comes from living within or below your means, not being a slave to instant gratification or impulsive spending. Avoiding debt and saving your money is the only path to financial peace and contentment.
July 31, 2012
This was a kinda humorous but ultimately impractical book. It seems to be meant as a slap in the face: "Hey you moron, save more and spend less!" But there's no practical investment advice (admittedly, the truth is that making the habit to save is vastly more important than optimizing your return on those savings) and a lot of unnecessary name-calling. It was a fun read but mostly just because I wasn't making many of the mistakes he derides, so I could get my schadenfreude along with the author by pointing and laughing at those with a more consumer-oriented or even debt-funded lifestyle. I felt a little ashamed of myself by the end though.
April 6, 2012
Great advice in simple layman terms. I am re-reading it, since my son is now in position to make some financial choices. plan on pointing out tips in this book to him
April 19, 2019
The book was pretty standard advice, but came off far too preachy for my taste. I could have dealt with the snark and brashness if the advice had been worth while, but honestly, the advice was don't use credit cards (unless you are using them to get the points and paying them off before incurring any interest) and don't spend more than you make. Hardly ground breaking stuff. I found it very disjointed from reality, from the estimate that you would be making $40,000 at age 25 if you went to school (both my husband and I went to school and neither of us are making 40k at 29 years old). Jobs making that amount of money are not easy to come by, and his estimate for what I should be spending on rent with our current income was something like $600. Even 10 years ago that would be outrageous. I don't live anywhere super expensive such as New York or Chicago, we live in rural Arizona, and even here, it's not worth saving the money on rent if you aren't safe in your own home. Can't save money if you're getting mugged or shot. The book itself is about a decade old, so I would expect mention of the housing crisis, but the explanation of the 2008 recession is about 80% of the book. This is a great advice book if you literally know nothing about finances but somehow make boat loads of money.
March 22, 2021
I like the book for the simple reason it helps you look outside your daily routine and see what's going on at a higher level of our society when it comes to debt. Do I think the author is a bit jaded, yes, but he also has some good points when it comes to the operations of our society and how to get ahead you have to do things others won't do. It's worth a read, keep in mind it's a bit dated now and would enjoy hearing his opinion on the last couple of years.
August 3, 2019
Too basic.
November 7, 2024
It was a struggle. But I did it.
November 8, 2025
In “Financially Stupid People Are Everywhere: Don’t Be One of Them,” Jason Kelly delivers a tough-love guide to overcoming the financial traps set by modern society. Highlighting the pervasive culture of debt, Kelly urges readers to reject consumerist messages, live within their means, and take control of their financial choices. He critiques banks and businesses for their misleading practices while emphasizing personal responsibility, using clear examples to illustrate paths to financial freedom. With insights into the root causes of issues like the 2008 economic crisis and practical strategies to avoid common pitfalls, this straightforward and empowering book equips readers to build lasting financial stability.
February 23, 2012
The book is kind of repetitive. It almost felt like it was a book disclosing about the US Government's in a conspiracy theory (which is true) about money and credit cards but sometimes it felt like THAT was the selling point of the book. Do bear in mind that I am already aware of this, hence it felt quite repetitive - basically a rehash of knowledge I already knew.
But anyways, the book is repetitive in other ways as well. The first few chapters are where the core ideas are.
The First Rule of Finance is: To never ever spend more than your means.
Also, get a debit card, not a credit card. Also do not keep payment balances and other tips about cars and housing (summarized as the 3 C's - Credit, Castle and Cars).
All of which - does not apply to me (a University student) who already is very careful with his money, owns a debit card and does not use a car.
Hence this book literally is for those 'financially stupid Americans' who owns all of those and who will GREATLY benefit from this knowledge.
For me, it is not applicable as I already know the idea. And don't really bother reading the other things (as it felt more like an extension of of the basic principles filled with small stories and anecdotes.
But anyways, the book is repetitive in other ways as well. The first few chapters are where the core ideas are.
The First Rule of Finance is: To never ever spend more than your means.
Also, get a debit card, not a credit card. Also do not keep payment balances and other tips about cars and housing (summarized as the 3 C's - Credit, Castle and Cars).
All of which - does not apply to me (a University student) who already is very careful with his money, owns a debit card and does not use a car.
Hence this book literally is for those 'financially stupid Americans' who owns all of those and who will GREATLY benefit from this knowledge.
For me, it is not applicable as I already know the idea. And don't really bother reading the other things (as it felt more like an extension of of the basic principles filled with small stories and anecdotes.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
September 21, 2012
the book is not bad
If you don't actively resist America's culture of debt, you'll end up precisely where the government, banks, and big business want you to be: indentured servitude. The mistakes people make with their money are basic, and avoidable, and unless you understand what they are, you're probably going to repeat them. What you need is someone who can shed light on the obstacles we face and show you how to avoid getting tripped up by them.
If you don't actively resist America's culture of debt, you'll end up precisely where the government, banks, and big business want you to be: indentured servitude. The mistakes people make with their money are basic, and avoidable, and unless you understand what they are, you're probably going to repeat them. What you need is someone who can shed light on the obstacles we face and show you how to avoid getting tripped up by them.
August 17, 2012
Enjoyed the in your face attitude. Felt as though he spoke to an audience who would be on the right path already more than those in need of guidance. I was highly motivated to stay my course. I felt his stern words were more a reflection of his (and my) contempt for the epidemic of indebtedness, than as a outright insult to the debt slaves. But then again who cares? Great book.
January 28, 2011
The beginning and the ending is helpful. The mid part is a disaster. I just can not think the higher education is part of service should be provided by governments. Blame Goldman Sachs as much as you like, but blame them for their roles in cap and trade policy is a little far reached.
March 2, 2011
Lots of good information, though it can come across as a bit paranoid and blame-gaming at times. He makes a very good point that the financial industry as a whole is NOT out to help you, only to make money. You have to protect yourself and keep control of your own finances.
January 12, 2011
Good basic info but came across as paranoid and overly harsh at times...
February 2, 2011
This book gave me a new perspective on our recent recession. His basic message, you only have yourself, don't get sucked into buying what you can't afford...
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