My 1st Million At 33 – yes, you can do it too

This is my first book review.  As a general rule of thumb, I won’t give out every detail in the book, so that there is something that you can discover when you read the book yourself, and by doing that I also respect the author’s & publisher’s copyright.

Mind Over Money by Eric Tyson

Eric discussed six types of people in respect to the ways that they deal with money.  The six types are Shopper, Workaholic, Obsessive Gambler, SuperSaver, Avoider, and a last type that I won’t disclose here.  By using some real cases and pointing out their short-comings, the author attempts to impart some basic principles in dealing with money.  While he is right most of the time, I must say that not everyone falls into one of the pathological cases that he classifies.  And even when someone is in a particular category, he or she may not behave pathologically.

At times, he will discuss certain small detail and try to put forth his special view on that matter.  One example is where he discusses why someone in his case doesn’t need to balance checkbook.  He claims that he never encountered anyone losing more than a few hundred dollar from bank error, and that the amount of time checking bank statement and balancing checkbook is simply not worth the time invested.  Yes, he claims that indeed he pay some bank fees because he overdrafts his checking account, but he gains much more by not spending his time on the tedious details.  While I enjoy a refreshing viewpoint from him and agree with him for the most part, I personally dare not to advise people to follow his example.  I think there are so many ID thieves around us that at the minimum, one should scan through their statements for potential big problem.

The book overall presents good advices for the pathological people that behaves such.  But I must say that probably because of his profession as a counselor, he encountered such cases.  Many other people however may behave much saner.  If you’re one of those people that in need of financial help, then I suggest you to take a look of his book for advices.  Otherwise, I don’t really think that every SuperSaver is afraid of investing his or her money, or cheats on taxes, or hoards without knowing when to stop.

P.S. Why I think one should check their statements & How I check them

Personally, I had ID thieve trying to charge my credit card.  And there is one time, bank made an error by depositing someone else’s $30000 bank CD into my wife’s account, when we tried “frantically” to go through our paper trails to search for a non-existent CD.  Now I’m sure that if the other person did what Eric does, not checking bank statements, the $30000 erroneous deposit would probably stay in my wife’s account for longer than just two weeks.

What I personally do in respect to checking bank & credit card statements is I only check for the transaction amounts in my bank statement, and I try to recount the charges made at the regular vendors that I go to with receipts that I regularly keep.  I never check the calculations made by credit card companies and banks, because I trust modern day computers.  As long as the transaction amounts are correctly inputted, the final result will definitely be correct.  When I don’t have much time, I will simply scan through the vendor column, and just make sure that there is no weird companies charging my credit card.  As for my bank statements which have just a few transactions, I only checked the list of the company names that use ACH to withdraw from my account, and I don’t spend much more time beyond that.  In total, I only spend about 30 seconds for my longest bank statement, and just under 2 minutes to scan through vendors on my credit card statements, assuming that I don’t check every transaction amount with my meticulous wife.  And I don’t balance my checkbook either.  I simply let automatic transactions to take care of the regular and necessary transfers.  And by heart, I try to know at least the first digit, but preferably the second digit too of my bank account balances.  The rest of the digits down to cents, computer can take care.