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Rating: 
Summary: A great starting point to Achieving Financial Independence!
Review: Money for Life is an outstanding book for those who wish to achieve financial independence by living indefinitely off investment gains. A basic stock market investment plan is outlined in addition to sound financial tips relating to IRAs, insurance, wills and debt management. Although the concepts of "paying yourself first," setting aside 10% of your pre-tax income and engaging in mechanical, unemotional stock market investing to beat the S&P 500 are not entirely new, this book presents them in an entertaining, fresh, new (and unbiased) light. It has motivated me to reexamine my own finances and plan for a future free from monetary worry.
Rating: 
Summary: Save your money!
Review: This book was a great disappointment. It contains nothing new, provocative or even interesting in the world of financial planning. It is painfully obvious that there was no real purpose in writing this book other than for the author to cash in on the hot "personal finance" category in book sales. Moreover, while the author does not quite stoop to the level of shameless self-promotion of the likes of, say, Wade Cook, he does nonetheless use the book to promote his new money management service as a way to achieve ones financial goals. Shame on you, Mr. Sheard! The "advice" in the book can be summarized in a few sentences: 1. Keep saving and investing until you have an amount saved up equal to 20 times your annual needs. (I.e., if you need $50,000 per year to live on, you need to save $1 million.) 2. Keep it all in the stock market and withdraw 5% a year to live on. 3. Quit working and do what you want. Unless you want to keep working, in which case you are free to continue doing so. 4. Oh, yeah. Make sure you make 15% a year on your stock market investments otherwise you'll run out of money. Of course, it's numbers 1 and 4 that may be a little difficult to acheive. Not to worry, though, the author recommends that you max out on your 401(k) and IRA contributions, and save 10% of the rest of your paycheck every month. (What novel concepts!) As the the 15% annual rate of return, the author conveniently ignores the nasty little fact that the long run return on stocks (up until the last decade) is about 10.5% a year and says you only need to follow a consistent strategy, like the Dogs of the Dow (which the author admits he himself doesn't follow) to make the magic 15% annual rate of return. And if you can't do it yourself, you can always hire his money management firm (for an annual fee of 1.5% of your assets, which means he will need to make 16.5% on your money annually for you to get 15%). Other than that, the book says to make sure you're adequately insured and lists few discount brokers (Brown & Co., Ameritrade) and well known web sites (Yahoo, Motley Fool) that you might want to check out to help with your stock selection and purchases. And that's it! Like I said, all in all the book is pretty worthless. There are far better personal finance books out there. (The one by Jane Bryant Quinn is one of the best.) Don't waste your money on this one.
Rating: 
Summary: Lame
Review: This is a one-idea book, and that idea was probably just about adequate to justify an article in a money-magazine: To figure out how much money you need to save to achieve financial independence, figure out how much you need to live on annually right now, and multiply that number by 20. The more intriguing promise of the book, to provide a plan to achieve this level of wealth while still relatively young, is a complete non-starter. The reader is offered such old chestnuts as "pay yourself first" and stash ten percent of your income annually. Gee, we haven't heard those tidbits before, have we? And please, for about 99.9% of the population, that advice might add up to a comfortable retirement at a ripe old age, but it certainly isn't going to get you to financial independence any time soon. The advice about investing is similarly a rehash of ideas we've heard a thousand times before. There is almost nothing new here. If you're a total newcomer to financial planning, this book might be an okay place to start, since it offers advice that has been around from many sources for a long time. But if you're looking for new insights, look somewhere else.
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