My First book review for USFinances.info and my goal is to give you a chapter by chapter peek at what’s inside, offer valuable insight, and ultimately give you an opinion of if it’s worth buying or not. Let’s dig in…

Preface And Introduction: Here the author spells out who he is, and why he wrote the book. I actually found this interesting, and it helped me understand the perspective, and background from which the book is written. Also, because I had never heard of the author before, I found this preface helpful in that it gave me reasons to believe the author, and read what he had to say.

Chapter 1: Recognizing Reality: There’s a nice story beginning on page 35, that outlines how Masterson and some of his friends started a business building swimming pools for people in their neighborhood. The story offers some great points. I thought it was a nice way to motivate and inspire people to start their own small business, whatever it may be. The bottom line of this chapter is to look at your finances and the current economy and realize that this picture might not be so great. For me, this chapter didn’t have much meat to it, and not much content that I hadn’t heard already. With the exception of the nice story, I pretty much skimmed through it.

Chapter 2: Plan To Become Wealthy: In contrast to the blandness of chapter 1, this chapter was great. I got a lot out of it. Very practical ideas on how we can prepare and become wealthy “by design”. Everything from outlining wealthy habits to goal setting, and daily planning. He even talks breifly about how to manage email. Very specific concrete actions we can take, and habits we can develop to help our wealth build. Something I liked about this chapter was that it gave some insight into how a wealthy or rich person might organize their day, and what habits they might have. Since I don’t particularly know any very, very wealthy people, this was nice. Questions I had like “How do really rich people organize their day?”, or “How do wealthy people go about getting through their email quickly?” got answered.

Chapter 3: Develop Wealthy Habits: Another great chapter. Specific, detailed habits that wealthy people have. He suggests 8 habits that he’s consistently found in the wealthy people he knows. Although some of the habits were somewhat repetitive of other books I’ve read, i.e. “They have multiple streams of income”, some of the habits where more unique, and ones I hadn’t thought of before, i.e. “They are good at what they do”. This chapter offered some novel points on wealthy habits, saving money, rich living, and maximizing your profession.

Chapter 4: Radically Increase Your Personal Income: This is a good chapter, (not great, but good). He talks about how to become very important at your work, how to get in the middle of the action, and how this will eventually thrust your salary upward. There were some very good, and interesting points in this chapter. Some ideas I hadn’t thought about before, and some reasonably great insights. Also, I like that many of the points and suggestions where things the reader could do right then and their to start increasing their value.

Chapter 5: Get Richer While You Sleep: This, for me, was the most boring chapter. He goes over and over again with financial calculations and numbers. Rental incomes, costs, projections, interest, etc. There was just way to many numbers related to real estate for me to get much out of it. Although I can appriciate some numbers and calculations, and I even found some of his calculations helpful, and something I could take with me, I really felt bogged down by the sheer amount of numbers and calculations in this chapter. I was also turned off by his high, high favor of real estate as a business and as income – that is so late 90’s .

Chapter 6: Retire Early: This is the final chapter and outlines the final thoughts of the book. He again praised on high mountains about real estate and it’s benefits and ease. Although I believe real estate is a wise investment, and can be very fulfilling, I also believe that times have changed since this book was written, and there would be a lot more emphasis on caution in real estate investment if this book were written now. The rest of the chapter is really great though, and one of my favorite parts of the whole book. He gives some excellent examples on how various levels of incomes should invest their money. He also gives some great advise on how to start your own small business – one of the themes of the book which I really enjoyed. I think this chapter is a nice cap and revamp of all the chapters, with some new insights that give it even more to emphasis.

Final Word: I believe this is a definite read for most anybody interested in making more money. It’s written in a comfortable tone, and gives middle class people an idea of how rich and wealthy people think. For people very interested in the subject it’s worth buying and permanently adding to your library. If you’re only some what interested in money making and success oriented books, it’s still a recommendation, but maybe from the library instead.

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