The Best Financial Books – Episode 087

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[00:01] Welcome to the Prosperity Podcast. Fresh, alternative, personal finance talk for independent thinkers who prosper outside of Wall Street. Here’s your hosts, best-selling author, Kim D.H. Butler and No BS Money Guy, Todd Strobel. Hey, everybody. Welcome to another edition of the Prosperity Podcast. This is No BS Money Guy, Todd Strobel. Once again, got best-selling financial author and my personal co-host and friend, Kim Butler, with us. Welcome, Kim. Hello, Todd. Very happy to be here. And today we’re going to be talking about, this week I was asked, what’s the best financial book I ever read? And I thought, what a great question, because I know I’m a reader, you’re a reader, we spend a lot of time reading.

[00:45] So I have to, we’ll get to my answers later. But if you had to answer that question, what would your answer be? Wow, that’s an awesome question. The best financial book? You understand that I have reams of papers of books and massive numbers of Kindle financial books, because I love reading financial books. But I do have to say that over the last probably 10 years, I’ve gotten pickier and pickier and pickier about what I’m reading. And I really start to pay attention to who’s writing because I have no patience for financial information that comes from a writer that doesn’t have financial background. And believe me, I so appreciate writing skill more than anything. I was an English major. I wrote a ton of papers.

[01:38] My daughter writes a ton of papers. I appreciate good writing skill. But it’s so obvious to me when somebody writes and they really don’t have the financial background. And then if you add that idea of prosperity economics, which we’ve been talking about, and how different that is from typical financial planning and typical financial advice that’s out there, then it becomes even pickier on my side for what I’m reading, because I’m not going to read a book that is about typical financial planning. All this is make me mad. In fact, that’s truly why I dropped my certified financial planner designation is that I got so tired of reading the test questions on the continuing ed that I had to take every two years.

[02:24] I literally in frustration one year just said, you know what, I’m not doing this. I’m not taking this test. I’m going to drop this designation. I’m not going to renew because I do not believe in what they’re writing about. I will say this, that in the financial arena, there’s an awful lot of marketing that is wrapped up as books that really is a sales brochure. It’s not a book. So those tick me off probably worse than anything. So I think I’d almost rather get a hold of one of the authors trying to take a stab at a financial topic just because it’s, you know, the hot thing of the day. Like, you know, what is it? Was it something for dummies? What they write like thousands of those, right? Right.

[03:06] How to write books for dummies or something. My all time favorite financial book. It’s a big one. Long time to read is Atlas Shrugged. I and Rand lived in the 50s and absolutely one of the most brilliant human beings that we were ever blessed with to have on this planet, in my opinion. I love that book also, and I loved when the movies came out. I have to admit I was a little disappointed by the time they got to number three. You could really tell they were running out of money, but it’s still a fabulous message and a thousand some page book, I want to say, but totally worth reading. And I’m glad that you brought up a book from the past because my immediate gut reaction when you asked me the question is the one I’m going to share.

[03:54] But it’s from 2003 and it’s called The Mystery of Capital. It’s by Hernando de Soto. So the first the man’s first name is Hernando and his last name is D Soto in two words D E S O T O. Mystery of Capital and the subtitle is Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else. Now, you just asked me about a financial book that is a financial book. It’s about capitalism, no doubt, but it talks about finance and the ownership of property in a way that I was not ever aware of. It was a fabulous education. It’s been actually quite a while since I’ve read it, but I’m going to dig it back out again and read it. It was a really good read. I thoroughly enjoyed it at the time. And there are so many lessons about our own personal economy that we can learn from reading books like that that are clearly about the bigger either US or even worldwide economy.

[04:57] But I guarantee you if you keep your eye on the seven principles of prosperity and look through the mystery of capital book that you will find them. They’ll come up left, right and center all over the place. And so it’s again a helpful book, even though it may not may not be directly related to personal finances. Okay, give me I got to have the five minute summary. So why why success in the West and failure in the East? Ah, well, it’s ownership of property without a doubt. And they don’t mean always just physical property. So it could be literal real estate, but it’s also ownership of corporations. It’s ownership of ideas. Our intellectual capital laws that we have in the US are just second to none in terms of putting the ownership and the control in the hands of the creator of that information.

[05:54] And that’s interesting, actually, just as I’m saying it in light of our. So again, this books out in 2003 in light of our now 2016 knowledge that at least according to Peter Diamandis and a lot of the abundance thinkers that are out there in the intellectual intellectual capital space. The idea of patents and the idea of protecting intellectual capital is starting to be hammered on by a corresponding idea that is known as open source. And so open source says, put your ideas out there, put your software on the web and let other people help you improve it and use it and build on it. Don’t lock things up behind patent laws and closed doors and rules that people cannot get at, etc. I mean, you could even just look at Apple and Android these days, and Apple is a closed environment.

[06:59] Android is an open environment and Android is growing and helping more people and more people are helping it. Then Apple is because it’s a closed door environment. So I liken it sometimes to Russia and the United States. But I’m sorry for the iPhone users. I don’t happen to have one. And I know you do, Todd. So there you go. Apple does still have the highest profit margins, though. So they’re still out there making a ton of money selling them. But it’s interesting. It’s it is told to totally different concepts. I mean, you know, Apple is using a lot of the same components as Android, but yet they’re able to charge five and six times the price because of the way they’ve built and marketed the for profit system.

[07:48] It’s interesting. I got to agree with you there. So how about what do you think of Pirates of Manhattan? Should that be on the list? I do like the Pirates of Manhattan by Barry Dyke. And he has a second version of it, as well as a third book out that maybe we can grab the title of here while we’re talking. And it is interesting because his books are also like ala shrug, huge tombs. You cannot get them on Kindle. You can only buy them, I think, maybe even off his website. And so I just want to really give a shout out to our listeners because a lot of you have listened. You have read our material and we try to make our books as available as possible. So under this discussion that we’re having of open source versus not, it’s just kind of interesting to note that Barry is using sort of old school, if you will, methods of selling his book.

[08:46] This is Barry Dyke, the author of Pirates of Manhattan. So for our readers, you can get a lot of value off Barry’s website, Pirates of Manhattan dot com. And yet he’s chosen to sell his books in paperback format only to those that people go to his website and buy. We’ve chosen to sell our books on CreateSpace, which is an Amazon company. And I don’t know if you as a listener knew this, but when you order that book, it gets printed. There is no inventory and that allows us to upload a new file if we want to update it, which, by the way, Live Your Life Insurance has just recently been updated. And I’m refraining from saying that Live Your Life Insurance is one of my favorite books, but I certainly could make a case for it.

[09:33] But it’s been updated and we just popped a new file up into the CreateSpace cloud and Amazon prints it for you. So if you want an updated Live Your Life Insurance book, you can go to Amazon and you buy it. It has a brand new chapter that’s specifically designed for new people, whereas the rest of the book was really designed for existing clients of ours. And it will help you a lot with the whole idea of how to use life insurance as a place to store cash. So back to Barry and his company, Capital Asset Management, I will get that title in two seconds here. The work that he has done in researching the ownership of life insurance throughout the banking community and how much, many, many, much dollars are in life insurance, stored in life insurance, owned by banks as some of their capital.

[10:30] And he has proof on every single one of that. Todd, talk about that for a moment while I find that title. Super. Yeah, he is certainly one of our favorite people and some people that he’s talked at some of our conferences, I think. I know I’ve met him a few different times and fascinating, absolutely fascinating to guide to get to know. Trying to think of the Pirates of Manhattan, the very first one, what was the main concept in there was? The tier one capital of ownership of, which is a banking term, the ownership of life insurance is the bulk of that. And that it is just proven page after page after page of information in both Pirates of Manhattan, which is a 2007 book, Pirates of Manhattan 2, which is 2012. And then his new one is called Guaranteed Income, a Risk-Free Guide to Retirement.

[11:32] And that is the 2015 book. The first two are available on Amazon. The third one, again, you have to go to his website, PiratesOfManhattan.com to get. But moving on, I do want to, as we finish up here, just let everybody know that we are going to have our Busting the Interest Rate Lies book out very, very shortly. And then Todd, I don’t even think you knew this, the first draft is out of Busting the Life Insurance Lies. I’m literally going to be reading that this weekend. It’ll probably be available to the public in April or May, I would guess. And this has been a real up level in our work in providing books. We had a whole team involved in this and I’m excited to be able to provide it for you.

[12:19] And I know not everybody loves to read, so we always do audio versions of our books. And there’s one book that you can grab as a listener to the podcast that is not available anywhere else. And that is called Financial Planning Has Failed, which is available both as an e-book and an audiobook on partnersforprosperity.com slash e-book. Again, that’s for our listeners only. So I encourage you to check that out. And before we finish up, I want to just give a mention and you’re going to have to help me here because my brain is freezing to Steve Denunzio’s book. Yes, absolutely. The Prosperity paradigm. I’m thinking. Yeah. Oh, I’m so glad you brought that up. We’re going to have to have a new list of books that we recommend because yes, the Prosperity paradigm by Steve Denunzio.

[13:13] That last name is D with apostrophe A-N-N-U-N-Z-I-O. And it’s an Amazon book that is just fabulous. And he uses the word prosperity, not any connection to us, but we love how he uses it. Very valuable tool. And I do know that on my LinkedIn record, LinkedIn, whatever my whatever that thing is called, my LinkedIn profile, I think is the proper word. I do have a list of books that are there. So if you’re really curious about books, you could check those out. And I know we’re going to have some forthcoming podcasts that are actual book reviews of books that Todd and I have both read that we think you’ll find interesting and helpful in your lives. Some of them are financial. Some of them are not. We’ll mix those in and around our various financial topics and hope to keep you interested in them.

[14:02] If somebody wanted to reach out to you on LinkedIn, are you using the Kim DH Butler or what do they look for? I am Kim DH Butler in East Texas. I think LinkedIn thinks I live in Tyler, Texas, but it’s actually Mount Enterprise. But it’s a small town, so you can’t blame them. Super. Well, this is No BS Money Guy Todd Strobel once again for the Prosperity Podcast. Thanks so much, Kim Butler, and take care, everybody. Thank you for listening to the Prosperity Podcast. To take control of your money and have it work for you, visit us at partnersforprosperity.com. If you liked this episode, make sure you subscribe and leave a review.