Financially Stupid People Are Everywhere: Don't Be One Of Them [Hardcover]

Jason Kelly (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 8, 2010

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 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.

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.

--This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Product Description
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.

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.

How to Break Free from America's Financial Chokehold
Amazon-exclusive content from author Jason Kelly

• Understand why it's so hard to escape financial servitude in America. You're up against a money-sucking culture that's been built through one hundred years of collusion between government, banks, and big business.

• See how that cabal has set financial traps almost everywhere you turn in daily life. From slippery credit card contracts to bad bank deals to pervasive advertising to the redirecting of your tax dollars into corporate crony coffers, they're out to fleece you every day in every way.

• Notice how many of the items you're told to buy are depreciating trifles, and how strongly you're encouraged to buy them with debt. That's no coincidence. Once they get most people on the treadmill, they keep them there for life.

• Know that to the ruling class of America, you're nothing but a lifetime income to be divvied up. They care not a whit about helping you achieve the "American dream," which is available only to those who see through the financial flimflammery.

• Read this book to finally see through that flimflammery. Get the truth into your bloodstream so you recognize the American economy for what it really is: a vehicle to transfer money from the financially stupid people to the financially smart people.

• Grasp how the system works against you so you know the ways to counteract it. Memorize this book's First Rule of Finance and guard against the three Cs, the serial killers of financial lives. This book clearly identifies those three Cs and provides you with a bullet-proof plan to defeat them.

• Your whole life comes down to how you answer one question: Will I live in debt or will I live free? Read this book, and live free.

From the Inside Flap

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, but 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 you face and show you how to avoid getting tripped up by them. That's why Jason Kelly—bestselling author of the acclaimed Neatest Little Guide series of financial books and Editor of The Kelly Letter—has created Financially Stupid People Are Everywhere.

Written in a straightforward and accessible style, this reliable resource reveals how society is rigged to take as much of your wealth as possible and outlines the simple ways to resist this. It investigates, explains, and offers honest 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. Page by page, Financially Stupid People Are Everywhere:

• Discusses why following the First Rule of Finance—spending no more than 80 percent of your take-home pay—is essential to get you headed in the right direction

• Introduces you to the Three Cs—credit cards, cars, and castles—and shows how controlling them can make a significant difference in your financial life

• Explores non-financial-sector threats to your wealth and what can be done to protect yourself against them

• And much more

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 will help you achieve this goal and lead you down the only proven path to financial freedom.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 214 pages
• Publisher: Wiley; 1 edition (June 8, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0470579757
• ISBN-13: 978-0470579756
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.9 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #500,311 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Jason Kelly is the author of nine books including "The Neatest Little Guide to Stock Market Investing," a BusinessWeek best seller now in its 2010 edition, and his newest title, "Stock Market Contest," published in November 2011. He also publishes "The Kelly Letter," a curiously readable weekly investment advisory.

He graduated from the University of Colorado in 1993 with a BA in English, but not before a professor told him that he would never succeed as an author because he "lacked a basic command of the English language." Luckily, IBM disagreed and hired Jason as a technical writer at its Silicon Valley Laboratory in San Jose, California. Once income from his freelance writing matched his income from IBM, Jason left corporate life to become a full-time freelance writer. About IBM hiring him for the only "real" job he's ever had, Jason wrote in Financially Stupid People, "I keep a special smile for Big Blue because of that break. It was the only company that believed in me. I never knew the meaning of the term 'competing offer.'"

One of Jason's Japanese publishers, Shueisha, brought him to Tokyo on book tour in 1999. He took that opportunity to visit his old high school exchange student friend, and wrote a funny article about the experience. That article remains one of Jason's most widely read. It's still on his site, at http://is.gd/cLe5V. Japan went straight to Jason's heart, and he decided to live there. He rented out his home in California and moved to Sano, Japan in 2002 for what he thought was going to be a one-year stay. Eight years later, he still lives and works there.

In addition to writing new books and "The Kelly Letter," he's also the angel investor in Red Frog Coffee in Longmont, Colorado, a delightful little shop managed by his sister and business partner, Emily.

Learn all you could ever want to know about Jason at jasonkelly.com/about.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Cuts to the chase, and doesn't mince words!, June 8, 2010

By 

Rjm Consulting "Rick" (NYC) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Financially Stupid People Are Everywhere: Don't Be One Of Them (Hardcover)

Right now, books about the Great Financial Crisis are almost falling out of the trees. This one really is different. Instead of (just) building the usual case about how the investment banks and bankers are greedy, evil b*stards (thinking up hyper-complicated ways to take other people's money), Kelly hammers home (even if too close to my home, it turns out!) some simple basic truths about money and personal financial responsibility. He then returns again and again to these essential rules and shows how violating them helped to create and then amplify the mess we are still in today. The rules are "fractal" in nature: they apply to the individual consumer, and to the US government, and to every sized borrower in between. (Even though his first rule of finance is, in essence, avoid or limit having to borrow.) Very quickly, you realize that those evil greedy bankers wouldn't be so damn rich if only people would stop being so incredibly stupid, financially.

The book is a fast read that I didn't want to put down - probably because in every chapter I kept stumbling over another anecdote or scenario that seemed uncannily familiar. Between pointing out the stupid financial choices we all make, and showing just what alternative choices we can make, this book keeps you thinking "yeah, he's right", and "why didn't I think of that?". I especially like the way he skewers the political extremists on both sides of the aisle, showing how financial stupidity and lazy voter apathy may combine to extend the status quo (good for the wealthy elite, not so good for the rest of us), and magnify the messes that occur.

I say, buy it, read it and keep it handy, and you won't "be one of them"!

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Buy this book for every member of your family!, June 9, 2010

By 

Roberta S. Carlson - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Financially Stupid People Are Everywhere: Don't Be One Of Them (Hardcover)

Solid common-sense approach to financial freedom - and it doesn't require a $$ investment in any program or financial consultant. You are only going to invest in yourself and reap the benefits. Also, do yourself a favor and sign up for the author's newsletter.

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars 4 Great Ideas and Lots of Fluff, November 10, 2010

By 

Vincent Peale "brooklynstyle" (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Financially Stupid People Are Everywhere: Don't Be One Of Them (Hardcover)

Kelly's book has 4 great ideas:

1. Don't spend more than 80% of your income

2. Don't carry balance on your credit card

3. Don't finance your car - pay cash for it

4. Don't put less than 20% down payment on your house

All of this is explained very clearly in Chapters 1 and 2. If you want to get the maximum benefit for the minimum amount of time, read those two chapters and skip the rest.

Chapters 3, 4, 5, and 6 tell you that big business and government work together and that they are out to screw you... as if we didn't know this. You must have the naiveté of an elementary school girl not to know about the big business lobbyist, the oil, war and health care agendas and who makes money from them, and that the whole bailout is you - the tax payer - picking up the tab for the big party Wall Street had in the last several years.

It's great to know Jason's opinion on these topics but it doesn't add much value.

Chapters 7, 8 and 9 are regurgitating Chapters 1 and 2. The last chapters don't add much else besides hype. They are like the super-excited college guys who cheer for someone else's idea.

"Hey, guys, let's get some beer and get drunk", someone says.

The guy cheerleaders then start hyping up: "yeah, man, let's get some beer, let's get crunk, let's get some beer, it's gonna be wild, yeah man, let's go for it, it's gonna be amazing, I'm getting drunk just thinking about it!". Lots of hype but no action.

I understand Jason's challenge - how do you write a whole book of 150+ pages on 4 very simple and practical ideas? The answer is layout the ideas and then fill the rest with fluff. Otherwise, Jason had to publish a pamphlet for which people would hardly pay $20+ and no publishing company would publish.

What would make Kelly's book an excellent one is:

1. a section on how to get out of debt once you are debt ridden

2. a section on what to do after - you've got your savings in order and then what? Jason has written several books on investing - he has the expertise to talk about the subject.

3. a section on how to get more value out of your money. Jason lives in rural Japan. Is this just because he likes it or is it because his money last him longer there? Many people move to other countries when they retire because their money have more value there. Japan is not one of those countries but who knows...

This book has a great potential to be a 5-star masterpiece. I hope there is a revised edition coming with more practical and relevant information.