Stop Over-Thinking Your Money

Most people believe that doing well with personal finance and investing is complicated. Preet Banerjee shows why this isn’t true in his new book, Stop Over-Thinking Your Money: The Five Simple Rules of Financial Success. He says that while it can be a lot of work to get an A+ in how you handle your money, you can get an easy A with his 5 rules, and right now “most people are somewhere near a C–”. (Disclosure: Preet is a friend of mine. However, as my long-time readers have likely figured out, I say what I really think, even if it involves criticizing a friend’s work or praising a foe’s work.)

The book is written in a conversational style that’s very easy to read. Banerjee explains that while the money rules are easy to understand, they can be challenging to follow the way that it can be challenging to stick with healthy eating and exercising. But the good news is that “getting physically fit is much harder than getting financially fit.” Financially, you only need “discipline for a short time, because once you get started down the right path, it gets easier.”

Banerjee has what I call a good sense of scale. He knows which mistakes have a small cost and which have a large cost. If you don’t save, “who cares about the difference in taxation of dividends and capital gains in your portfolio? What portfolio?” With his 5 rules, Banerjee focuses on the actions that give the biggest return. If a financial choice has only a modest impact, he says you should only worry about that if you’re going for your A+. When you’re focusing on your A first, things get much simpler.

For the rest of this review, I’ll pick out a few parts of the book I found particularly interesting.

Life Insurance Underwriting

Most books that discuss life insurance don’t even mention the critical issue of the time of underwriting; Banerjee leads with it. Mortgage life insurance typically gets underwritten at the time of the claim. That’s a fancy way of saying that they wait until you die to check your mortgage insurance application to see if you qualify for life insurance. What good is life insurance if you don’t know if it will pay?

Cash

Banerjee recommends that you “have a few hundred dollars (or more) in cash stored in a safe place in your home” to “buy necessities if there is a natural disaster that knocks out the ability to pay ... with debit and credit cards.” That’s one I hadn’t thought about before.

Financial Fire Drill

“Pretend you lost your job today and you won’t find work again until the end of the year.” Banerjee doesn’t want you to just imagine this scenario; he wants you to live it for a few months. Except for things that are difficult to cut for just a few months, he wants you to try living for a while as though you must cut way back on expenses.

Real After-Tax Interest

Banerjee goes through an example to show that today’s interest rates on savings aren’t much different from what they were in 1980 after you deduct taxes and inflation. This directly contradicts claims by others that savers fared better in the past when interest rates were high.

The Right Way to Think about Borrowing

“Think of borrowing money as negotiating a pay-cut with your future self.”

Passive vs. Active Investing

“Most people are better off in a low-cost, passively managed portfolio.” However, “the good news is that [portfolio cost] doesn’t matter if you’re just starting out.”

“How you set up your investments when you have a large portfolio is phenomenally important. How you set up your investments when you have a small portfolio is phenomenally unimportant. How much you contribute is what you need to focus on first.”

Financial Advice

Banerjee believes that most people need financial advice, but not just about their investments. He gives the clearest description I’ve seen of the different models for how funds charge you money and how financial advisors are compensated.

His description of the advantage of being able to write off the cost of a fee-based advisor leaves out the added taxes on the higher investment returns. He says he will clarify this point in a future version of the book.

Conclusion

Overall, I highly recommend this book as a way to get the message out that running your personal finances well can be simple. People would do well to make sure that they deserve an A based on Banerjee’s rules.