Customer Reviews

Mary Farrell's Beyond the Basics: How to Invest Your Money, Now That You Know a Thing or Two

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

Money magazine (and the other reviewer) were right and these two books will give you the needed money knowledge. "Beyond the Basics" gives useful investing advice.

Money's other pick, "Simple Money Solutions: 10 Ways You Can Stop Feeling Overwhelmed By Money and Start Making It Work For You," by Nancy Lloyd fills in the rest of the picture.

I strongly recommend both books because they work well together!

"Beyond the Basics" gives insightful advice on choosing investments. But I also had other money matters to resolve, such as credit card debt, student loans and a large mortgage competing for my income.

Money magazine's other recent recommendation, a book called, "Simple Money Solutions: 10 Ways You Can Stop Feeling Overwhelmed By Money and Start Making It Work For You," is also helping me with these other financial issues.

Together these books will answer all your money questions and help you achieve financial freedom!

When I bought this book I expected to get unbiased information but all that's here is an ad for Ms. Farrell's employer. If it's supposed to be objective material, why does Paine Webber own the copyright and not Ms. Farrell?

Ms. Farrell doesn't get how markets now work. This book would have been great 20 years ago. Now it's just out of date.

Two better books are Andrew Tobias's "The Only Investment Guide You Will Ever Need" and Peter Lynch's "One Up On Wall Street."

Mary Farrell will be familiar to many from her appearances as a panelist and occasional guest host on Wall Street Week. The simple, straightforward intelligence of those shows comes across in this book as well. The book is written in a gentle, simple way that makes investing seem much more comfortable as a subject.

Although she says that this book is for those who are beyond the basics, one person's basics are another person's advanced methods and vice versa. Actually, she portrays every important financial investing concept in here someplace. It will be especially helpful to those who have done limited investing before and do not have a business or investing education.

The subjects she covers include goal setting, developing and implementing an investment plan, savings for investment, updating your plan, and learning more about investing. To succeed in those five steps towards achieving your financial goals, she helps you understand the importance of compound interest and being in the market for a long time, the role of diversification, where to find investment information and what to use it for, how the Internet should be used, creating an investment team, how to identify powerful investment themes and stocks that represent them, how mutual funds can help, the potential role for bonds and other financial investments (including hedge funds), the special issues that women face, preparing investments for children, getting ready for retirement, and protecting wealth.

The main weakness of these discussions is that they tend to look at things from the perspective of the pros and cons, rather than fully exploring the odds. For example, few mutual funds match the indices over 10 years, and individuals usually do worse. You won't find those facts in this book. Naturally, the success of a brokerage firm (like PaineWebber where she works as an investment analyst) depends on people mostly trying to beat the market so you would expect those arguments to be made here.

For those who would like to invest to beat the market, by far the most interesting part of the book are her discussions of the investment themes of aging baby boomers and the information revolution. You will undoubtedly get some new investment ideas from this excellent, imaginative review.

If you decide to read this book, I suggest that you also read John Bogle's Common Sense on Mutual Funds. It will balance out the missing elements of the message here. After that, you will have moved beyond the elementary level of investment knowledge.

What you will still be missing is emotional experience. The ups and downs of the market cause people to make a lot of mistakes -- especially selling low and buying high. You'll have to be an investor for a while to learn about that. After you experience those issues, you probably should also read one of the many books on knowing yourself psychologically as an investor.

After you read this book, ask yourself what else you have yet to learn the basics of. Do you have the equivalent knowledge of finding the ideal job, buying a home, raising children, and having great relationships? If not, work on these areas as well to overcome your stalled, complacent thinking. Your life could greatly improve as a result.

I thought I was buying a well-researched book by a woman I've seen on television for decades. Instead, all I got was an advertisement from her employer, PaineWebber. At least when Price Waterhouse publishes books (and they've published some good ones) they put their name right on the cover so you know what you're getting. I feel duped by Ms. Farrell.

Taking a page out of Suze Orman's playbook, Ms. Farrell is trying to make a profit by scaring women about finances. Some women are smart enough (and confident enough) to avoid being taken in by this scare tactic but that doesn't stop people like Ms. Farrell from using fear to fatten her own bank account. Peter Lynch and Andrew Tobias have written far more helpful and less frightening books than Orman or Farrell.

As if Suze Orman wasn't doing enough harm to women, now supposedly respectable women, like Mary Farrell, are trying to make money by playing off of women's fears. And she's doing it as a mouthpiece for her employer, Paine Webber. If you want money advice written by a woman, buy Jane Bryant Quinn's book then invest in some good mutual funds that you (not Mary Farrell) choose.

I expected more based on the press releases and after seeing her on television for so many decades.

Not very insightful. Lacked new information. Merely repackaged old ideas with "catchy" phrases.

I have always admired Mary Farrell on Louis Rukeyser's Wall St Week, where she can be counted on to offer really perceptive financial insights. Her new book shows her to be equally good as a financial writer. It seems to me to fill an important niche between a book for the novice and a book for the professional. I found her comments on thematic investing especially useful as well as her risk/reward ratios. I am eager to see what she does next.