How To Really Ruin Your Financial Life and Portfolio

By Ben Stein

Hilarious advice on what NOT to do with money, from financial funny man Ben Stein

Everyone's searching for the secrets to financial success, but what about the best ways to lose money . . . fast?! In How To Really Ruin Your Financial Life and Portfolio, bestselling author, economist, financial commentator, and media personality Ben Stein explains exactly what to do . . . to go bust! The ultimate "how-NOT-to" guide, the book gives readers invaluable tips that should be avoided at all costs. Written in Stein's own inimitable style, this hilarious guide provides essential financial advice on what not to do when it comes to managing money.

From reading and acting upon investing newsletters to trading on a margin, from investing in bonds to breathlessly following CNBC, and from buying stock in firms you do not understand to believing in your own genius at stock picking to keeping as little cash on hand as possible, Stein presents the rules that every would-be investor needs to know, so they can do the exact opposite and actually make money. Fully revised and updated, this new edition presents all-new missteps that can destroy any portfolio.

• Fully revised and updated edition of the tongue-in-cheek bestseller that shows investors what not to do with their money
• Written by acclaimed author economist, financial commentator, and media personality Ben Stein
• Loaded with indispensable pieces of bad advice that readers should avoid at all costs

A laugh-out-loud approach to personal finance, How To Really Ruin Your Financial Life and Portfolio is an accessible guide to money from the funniest man in finance.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wiley
• Release date: Aug 22, 2012
• ISBN: 9781118461464

Ben Stein

Ben Stein is a respected economist who is known to many as a movie and television personality. He has written about finance for Barron's, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and Fortune, and he is a regular contributor on CBS's Sunday Morning, CNN, and Fox News. One of the chief busters of the junk-bond frauds of the 1980s, he has been a longtime critic of corporate executives' self-dealing and has co-written eight books about finance.

Book preview

Preface

It has only been the wink of an eye since I wrote How to Really Ruin Your Financial Life. Nevertheless, I have had endless rushes of additional admonitions I would respectfully add to the list of do’s and don’ts.

The first that comes to mind is that I may have, over the course of my life, been too zealous in urging men and women to save for their old age. Naturally, it is sensible, even mandatory, to have enough for a decent old age. To be old and in penury is misery in amber.

But as I have grown old much faster than I ever dreamed possible, it also occurs to me that life should be lived and enjoyed as it’s happening. To postpone your joy and happiness and even material consumption to leave more for yourself when you are too feeble to enjoy it or more for your heirs is—it seems to me—often a mistake. Let them fend for themselves once a comfortable level of inheritance is reached. Let you enjoy your life while you are still young enough to do so.

A delicate balance is required, but sometimes spending is better than saving. My parents offered me the best example. They were too frugal (although wildly generous with my sister and me). They should have lived a life of more first-class travel. I wish they had lived it up more themselves and left less to the IRS, which feasted mightily on their remains.

No foolish extravagance, but some extravagance, is a decent rule.

I have spent most of my life in the company of hounds, first Weimaraners and then German Short-Haired Pointers. Except for the pleasure of knowing God in my life through the presence of kindly human souls, I have gotten more out of my dogs than out of any other experience. I know I have said it before, but if it is at all possible, get and love a hound.

The second best investments I have ever made have been the registration fees I paid for my dogs. I would literally not be alive at all without their love and warm furry goodness. I have been blessed enough to make money from halfway decent investments and I live in sinful luxury. But the very best things I own are my dogs, although in truth, they own me.

What is the single best investment I have ever made in my life? The marriage licenses and wedding and engagement rings I bought for Big Wifey. (We have been married twice to each other.) Big Wifey is by far the treasure of my life. If you can find a mate who is as good to you as my wife has been to me, even one tenth as good, snap her up, buy the ring, and show the love. You will never have anyone else or anything else as important in your life as your spouse and whatever investment it takes to get her and keep her, do it.

Next, when you have good friends, show appreciation. As I write this, I am thinking of various unbelievably good friends, and I don’t think it’s ever possible to show it enough, express it enough, and be grateful enough in word and deed. An incredibly good investment is to treat your friends with respect and love. A super good way to ruin your life in every way, not just financially, is to treat your friends with disrespect and contempt. And never—and I mean never—brag about money to them.

As I write this in the spring of 2014, I have just returned from a visit to my beloved Uncle Bob, the brother of my wife’s long-deceased father. Uncle Bob lives in Little Rock. He grew up in a small town called Prescott, Arkansas. He was a major league war hero in Korea. He was a lieutenant and his unit was pinned down by Chinese machine gun fire in the ice and snows of the retreat at Cho-Sin Reservoir.

He crept behind the machine gunners, all the while being fired at; shot the enemy; and saved his unit. For this, his commander recommended him for the Silver Star. (My father-in-law was awarded that medal for valor in World War II.) Bob Denman said that he would not accept the medal unless every man in his unit got one because they had all undergone the same horrors. It is not a unit citation, he was told, and so he went home with many other medals but not that one. He is a demigod of