James Berman – The Definition of Wealthy

The Definition of Wealthy: Living Small

By James Berman, author of Lessons from the Lemonade Stand: A Common Sense Primer on Investing

Over my years as an investment adviser, I’ve had several clients ask me “Am I wealthy?” as if I can provide an answer somehow they themselves could not. Like the psychoanalyst — and no doubt to my clients’ extreme annoyance — I ask them in return: “Do you feel wealthy?”
They rarely do. And that goes for the clients with half a million, five times that much and 20 times.

Beyond money for basic needs, wealth remains more a psychological construct than a factor of dollars and cents. And a comparative one at that. As the old saying goes, you’re “rich” if you make more money than your brother-in-law. The categorization of the 1 percent is a grand effort at comparison. Aside from the political rhetoric, who hasn’t thought about what percentile they inhabit?

The deeply ingrained and evolutionarily hardwired need to compare ourselves to others and strive to eclipse them is at root a healthy instinct. When it morphs into bitter envy or reckless acquisition, it stops being good for the pocketbook or soul. As billionaire and Warren Buffett-partner Charlie Munger says: “Out of the seven deadly sins, envy is the only one that you will never have any fun with.”

Catch-22 author Joseph Heller was reportedly once talking to Kurt Vonnegut at a Shelter Island cocktail party. Vonnegut pointed to the mogul who was hosting the lavish event at his summer compound and asked Heller if it didn’t bother him that the guy made more in a single day than he had made in a lifetime on his hit novel Catch-22? Heller replied: “I have something he’ll never have. Enough.” Whether or not that was just an author’s disingenuous and clever turn of phrase (and Heller was actually supremely irked as most humans would be), there’s a merit in knowing when enough is enough. As the Buddhists say, contentment is the greatest wealth.

When people are consumed by envy, they make bad investors. I see it every day. The obsessive need to make more than others can lead to excessive risk-taking, over-leveraging and poor judgment. The desire to make more quickly can induce people to trade frenetically and gamble fruitlessly, forsaking the only reliable method of making money on their capital: investing it patiently for long-term growth. Most people should align their assets to make a decent risk-adjusted real return above and beyond the inflation rate, not swing for the fences and strike out in a feverish effort to get ahead. If an investment adviser or broker ever tells you they will make you rich, walk the other way. The most any responsible adviser can do (or at least offer to do, even if they eventually exceed these expectations) is grow your money slowly over time.

A key to acquiring wealth is preventing living standards from rising along with income. Those who let their needs swell commensurately with their wallet never feel rich. They become trapped by the trappings. Fancy vacations, multiple homes, boats and other toys, all become perceived needs. As soon as they become needs, they become traitors and quislings, eventually stealing the very happiness they once engendered. The most extreme practitioner of living small as the money grows is Warren Buffett himself, who still lives in the same house he bought in 1957.

My favorite, usable definition of wealth is having one more dollar per day than you actually need, earned through work you enjoy. And an eventual retirement unfettered by financial cares. Or by envy.

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Genre – Business & Investing

Rating – PG

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Website http://www.lessonsfromlemonade.com/

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Lessons from the Lemonade Stand explains investing, stocks and bonds, risk, diversification, commodities, and other sometimes mystifying topics in the context of that most classic of all American businesses: the corner lemonade stand.

Rooted in the fundamental truth that common sense is the best investment tool, this book slices important concepts into simple sections, sweetening them with folksy, easy-to-read language.

The trials and tribulations of lemonade stand owner Lucinda highlight every concept from interest rates to retirement accounts to leverage. Readers learn investment basics as they follow Lucinda Lemonade Inc. along its sweet (and sometimes sour) journey as a start-up, from the squeeze of the first lemon to its initial private equity deal and its eventual foray into tech, all in the tidy town of Lemonville.

Lessons from the Lemonade Stand simplifies investment concepts without watering them down. A stock, for example, is not defined in financial gibberish but for what it truly is: a slice of the business that entitles the stockholder to a little drop of every dollar Lucinda Lemonade Inc. earns.

The book introduces ten simple Lemonade Laws:
1) Every topic in the investment world can be broken down to the basic concept of supply and demand.
2) If someone claims an investment is risk-free, run the other way.
3) Bigger returns mean bigger risks.
4) Hedging may help, but there’s always a cost to it.
5) As Warren Buffett says, “If you’re smart, you don’t need leverage; if you’re dumb, it’ll ruin you.”
6) You may not be able to count on your stocks, but you can always count on your taxes.
7) By the time you invest in a foreign country, it shouldn’t be foreign to you.
8) Owning a home is (still) the best investment of all.
9) Investing without work is gambling: treat the market like roulette, and you’ll land on zero.
10) Counterintuition, not intuition, is the investor’s best friend.
Entertaining and fun, Lessons from the Lemonade Stand supplies readers with the ingredients they need to become savvy investors.

“By abstracting out the ‘hard’ stuff about investing and focusing on the most simple of businesses, Berman (a finance prof at NYU and an investment advisor) is able to gradually introduce more complicated concepts without overwhelming the reader with jargon. Really, Lessons from the Lemonade Stand encompasses much of an introductory finance curriculum in book form that reads, well, more like a book of fiction than one on investing.”

Review: Lessons from the Lemonade Stand: A Common Sense Primer on Investing by James Berman

Lessons from the Lemonade Stand: A Common Sense Primer on Investing by James Berman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Would you recommend this book? How would you rate it? I recommend this book to anyone who would like more information about investing but does not know where to start.

Did you learn something new reading this book? Yes, learning something from reading is always the best book. I learned to be more careful in what company I invest my money with.

Are the book's issues controversial? The issues are not controversial but they provided some good discussions. Our money is something we control. We all want to make more money and the easier the better. Thankfully the author points out that nothing is ever a sure thing and to invest wisely.

Disclosure: I received a review copy of this book from the author.

View all my reviews

Orangeberry Book Of The Day – Dark Mountain by Robert Michael

While hiking on a lonely mountain in Arkansas, Jacob Barclay finds a cabin with a terrible secret.

Sheriff Billy Joe Shoemaker discovers that his small, backwoods town may hold more danger than he ever imagined.

Molly Carothers, lost in a sea of woods, starving and scared, believes she has found a guardian angel to free her.

Brian Carothers, haunted by his family’s heritage, struggles with his sanity.

Victor Carothers influences his family through fear and blood. Along with his wife, Patsy, they find victims among transients and strangers as they seek to sate their appetite for the occult.

The lives of the town of Bexton, Arkansas depend upon Jacob, the strange Yankee seeking adventure and solace. Jacob finds he is faced with a struggling faith, and the realization that sometimes evil runs in the family.

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Genre – Horror / Suspense

Rating – PG

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Blog http://www.robertamichael.blogspot.com/

Blog http://www.infinitewordpress.com/

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Orangeberry Book Of The Day - Beyond Escape - Deborah Jensen

 

After separating from her husband of twenty years, Kim is in desperate need of an escape. Retreating to her parents’ home in Texas for a month, Kim encounters ample distractions, the best being Camilo, an alluring Latino man seventeen years her junior. However, when returning to Texas unearths memories of a long-ago lover, Kim discovers her unintentional involvement in a series of dangerous escapades, bringing her deeper into her past than she ever cared to venture. Beyond Escape follows Kim as she pursues a trail of drugs, murder, and secret love affairs that were meant to stay buried.

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Genre – Women’s Contemporary Fiction / Romance

Rating – PG13

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Website http://www.deborahkjensen.com/

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Orangeberry Book Of The Day - Sex and Death in the America Novel - Sarah Martinez

Free March 19th - 21st.

Vivianna Post is the family anomaly. Daughter of a Pulitzer Prize winner and an academic, she has never quite fit her parents’ expectations as a free-spirited erotica writer. When Vivianna encounters the award-winning author Jasper Caldwell at a nightclub, all she wants is to blame him for blowing off her brother at a writers’ conference the year before and possibly causing his suicide. But as the night—and then the weeks—wear on, Vivianna finds herself drawn to Jasper in ways she cannot understand. When their differences—literary and sexual—threaten to pull Vivianna and Jasper apart, Jasper rediscovers Alejandro, an old friend who just might have the power to complete them both in every way. Using quotes and references to classic erotic and literary icons, Sex and Death in the American Novel is on one level an unconventional romance and on another a discussion of the merits of erotic literature.

Using quotes and references to classic erotic and literary icons, Sex and Death in the American Novel is on one level an unconventional romance and on another a discussion of the merits of erotic literature.

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Genre – Literary Erotica

Rating – X

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Website http://www.mywildskies.com/

Author Interviews http://site.mywildskies.com/Appearances.html

 

Excerpt (First pages):

We all know the first line is the most important: it sets the tone, tells you what this story will be about. Call me Vivianna. Would Melville approve? How about copying straight from Heller: It was love at first sight. We all remember Lolita; how would Nabokov do it?

What if I just come out and say it. This book is the answer to the notion that women ought to fear asking for what they want the most. Whether it’s time alone to write, demanding for and getting respect, or a patient hand under which to soften up and eventually get off. You know what’s even worse: we know we won’t get it anyway. Fuck Virtue. This document serves as my rejection of the notion that I am doomed—by virtue of my gender—to a life of boredom, inanity, and servitude.

An old man in Arizona has over seventy wives. If a woman ever said that one man wasn’t enough for her, you know what they would say about her? I could spend at least ten minutes on the list. Making up lists is a great writing exercise by the way. I learned that from my father. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1989 for his novel Taking Ivy Down. Dear old Dad.

Let’s start with two men—just for argument’s sake. What would that look like? Feel like? Smell like? Taste like?

            Two men…two sets of lips, two pairs of eyes moving over my face, my breasts, my hips, resting further down. Two sets of hands, warm and strong, only me, naked and trembling with anticipation between them. Two rustling, soft heads of hair, two minds, two hearts...spirits, two of everything. The energy between them flows through me. Associations come freely when I am in this state; rain, dark swirling skies, and rich red blood flowing from both their hammered faces, they fought…for me. Now we are all together, and they’ve forgiven each other, their bruised lips crush against mine, against my face, against every part of me until finally they come together. As I tip my head back, taking in the scents of their bodies, metallic and musky, sweaty and raw, they reach for each other. The one who lost the battle—the blonde with red rimmed blue eyes—faces me, his arms around mine, his hands reaching further to the one behind me who, underneath the scents of exertion, smells like leather and tangy soap. Their faces come together over my shoulder, first testing, pulling back, then together again. They kiss, more roughly than they would kiss me, with hands moving up to run through each other’s hair, pulling on it, and both pairs of hands move over my arms and shoulders. Sounds of stubble across skin, scraping, hands over tingling flesh, mine, a wince, low voices, soft wispy sounds echo in the silence of this old warehouse...no wait, make that a boxing ring, we’re on the dirty white mat in the center of the ring.

The one behind me—the winner—leans forward, grazing the skin behind my ear with his teeth, the sticky wet skin of his torso connecting all the way along my back. He pushes me down, working himself deeper in me, opening me wide, his hands wrap around both sides of my hips. He groans and the sound sends a thrill though me. The one in front works his way in from below. I am sandwiched between the two of them, and take the loser’s face in my hands, stroking the area near his swollen eye, running the tip of my nose over his lips, his cheek; I gently kiss his forehead, pulling back and tasting coppery blood.

My mother’s words intruded, “Vivianna, are you paying attention?”

 

Orangeberry Book Of The Day - Alice in Deadland Trilogy - Mainak Dhar

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Genre – Horror / SciFi

Rating – PG

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Alice in Deadland
Civilization as we know it ended more than fifteen years ago, leaving as it's legacy barren wastelands called the Deadland and a new terror for the humans who survived- hordes of undead Biters.
Fifteen year-old Alice has spent her entire life in the Deadland, her education consisting of how best to use guns and knives in the ongoing war for survival against the Biters. One day, Alice spots a Biter disappearing into a hole in the ground and follows it, in search of fabled underground Biter bases.
What Alice discovers there propels her into an action-packed adventure that changes her life and that of all humans in the Deadland forever. An adventure where she learns the terrible conspiracy behind the ruin of humanity, the truth behind the origin of the Biters, and the prophecy the mysterious Biter Queen believes Alice is destined to fulfill.
A prophecy based on the charred remains of the last book in the Deadland- a book called Alice in Wonderland.
Through The Looking Glass: Alice in Deadland Book II
More than two years have passed since Alice followed a Biter with bunny ears down a hole, triggering events that forever changed her life and that of everyone in the Deadland. The Red Guards have been fought to a standstill; Alice has restored some measure of peace between humans and Biters; and under Alice, humans have laid the foundations of the first large, organized community since The Rising- a city called Wonderland.
That peace is shattered in a series of vicious Biter attacks and Alice finds herself shunned by the very people she helped liberate. Now she must re-enter the Deadland to unravel this new conspiracy that threatens Wonderland. Doing so will mean coming face to face with her most deadly adversary ever- the Red Queen.
Off With Their Heads: The Prequel to Alice in Deadland
A few months before Alice was born and fifteen years before the dramatic events depicted in Alice in Deadland, there was The Rising. A few days that destroyed human civilization as we know it, reducing much of the world to a radioactive wasteland teeming with hordes of undead Biters and controlled by a shadowy Central Committee.
Off With Their Heads brings to life the final harrowing days of The Rising through four shorts, each depicting events through the eyes of one pivotal character in the Alice in Deadland series. See how Dr. Protima became the Queen of the Biters; feel the pain of a young man's sacrifice as he becomes the bunny-eared Biter whom Alice later follows down a hole; follow the rise of Chen from a conflicted young Chinese Army officer to a General in the Red Guards; and finally share in the dramatic escape of Alice's parents from a city overrun by Biters.

Orangeberry Book of the Day - Crosswalk - Cara St. Louis

"I grew up a girl, and I thought an unwanted one, at that, in the 40s and 50s in a forgotten farming and ranching town right at the Four Corners. We were surrounded by reservations, more of the unwanted, just like me. My ticket out was music and so on the old Baldwin my Mom bought me, I practiced until my fingers bled and I got a college scholarship and I was out. That was part one. The part with the family, which I didn’t even think was so great. My Dad took off and my mom had to work as a nurse forty-five minutes’ drive east. In 1945, that might as well have been the moon. So my grandmother kept me like an extra broom, kind of useless and in the way. Or so I thought. Part two was working for the government. That really took me places. All over the world, working for scientists, seeing their secrets, even when I didn’t understand what they were on about. When I did, the whole thing scared the hell out of me. Then , it all came true. Suddenly. Then, I died. I’ve left my daughter behind to tell the story. Maybe it’ll help."
It would be a tragedy, in anyone’s book, if on a beautiful summer Sunday morning a little old lady set out on foot for church and just as she had almost reached the other side of Main Street in a little seaside village, she was brutally run down and killed. What if this seemingly random and incoherent event …the slightest blip on anyone’s radar…had, in fact, happened to a woman who had been granted so long ago a very high military security clearance; a woman who is never named in the novel nor is the town in which she died?
Crosswalk is a thriller, a story whose dramatic arc runs razor-close to current events. The woman’s daughter, Christina, falls down a truly black and greasy rabbit hole in the wake of her mother’s death that leads through bio-engineering, weather manipulation, Naval Research, Naval Weapons, Atmospheric research connected to DARPA and through London, Virginia and Hawaii. The birthplace of her mother’s murder, when she finds it, lies within the circle of Operation Paperclip scientists still working in London in the 80s and 90s. Christina and those she joins with along the way struggle on to find answers despite being chased by Blackhawks, run off roads, betrayed by allies...her comrades include a Canadian civil rights activist who styles himself ‘Amistad,’ an old Brazilian psychic emigrated to Australia, and a chemist-turned-activist also on the trail of these psychotics; half a dozen ancient men who form a sinister cabal. The Gatekeepers are scientists, liaisons with the Joint Chiefs, a global industrialist of unmatched power and wealth, a US Secretary of Agriculture.
While Christina is on her own mission to flush out those who murdered her mother, Tim Verzet, firebomber and ex-military pilot infiltrates the very nerve-center of the global poisoning operation trying to make it implode from the inside. One very well-placed traitor just about brings the whole effort down but in the end, the Achilles heel of the entire campaign, a campaign which has actually been in place for decades, is a very small group, led by one pilot on the inside.

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Genre – Thriller

Rating – PG

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