How to Really Ruin Your Financial Life and Portfolio Hardcover - 2012 - 1st Edition

From the rear cover

The secret to making money is sticking to the basics, but while they might be your best bet for success, they're not exactly thrilling. For years, Ben Stein has extolled the virtues of keeping things simple, but many people--maybe you among them--are too easily distracted by the lure of frills and fads promising quick and easy riches to pay at-tention. Now, in How to Really Ruin Your Financial Life and Portfolio, Stein takes a tongue-in-cheek new approach, offering advice on how to succeed spectacularly ... at losing money!

The ultimate how-NOT-to guide, this book highlights the 49 ways in which investors manage to torpedo their portfolios by ignoring the simple facts of finance, to help you reconsider the way you're treating your money before it's too late.

From believing you can outthink the market to assuming that current trends will last forever, and from ignoring your tax returns to shunning financial advisors, this is the advice you absolutely don't need. In his own inimitable style, Stein dispenses the invaluable information that any intelligent investor should avoid at all cost, to help you identify the problems with your own portfolio-building efforts so that you can take countermeasures to get your money working for you.

A laugh-out-loud approach to personal finance, Economist and comic Ben Stein brings you the tips you need to know ... if you want to go broke. Explaining the rules for failure so that you can run, screaming, in the opposite direction, How to Really Ruin Your Financial Life and Portfolio explains the missteps that can destroy any portfolio to help you keep yours safe.