Scott Adam’s book ‘Dilbert and the Way of the Weasel 
Most of the book is dedicated to work related ‘weaseldom’ but there are some parts talking about life in general. He discusses financial advisers and includes some interesting insights to personal finance. The main point being that everything you pay a personal finance adviser for could be written on a single page. A financial adviser will cringe to see you walk into their office holding their entire body of knowledge on a single sheet of paper. Of course Scott Adam’s is much better at the delivery and I probably just butchered the joke. At any rate it’s worth the time to read it.
Dilbert’s One Page Personal Finance List
- Make a will
- Pay off your credit card balance
- Get Term Life insurance instead of Whole Life Insurance if you have a family to support.
- Fund your company’s 401K to the max
- Fund your ROTH IRA to the max
- Buy a house if you can afford it and will live in it
- Put 6 Months of living expenses in a money market account
- Take all the extra money and invest 70% in a stock index fund
- Take 30% of the money and put it in a Bond fund through a discount broker
- Don’t touch your money until you retire
- If you are doing anything outside the things listed here hire a Fee Based Financial adviser and not someone working off commision.
He concludes that anything outside this list is worse. Want to invest in Managed mutual funds, its worse. Want to buy individual stocks, its worse.
The list is pretty good. For the most part it’s very hard to argue with any of the points. If you think about all the books that have been written on the subject it makes this list even better.
Listen to Dilbert and the Way of the Weasel
