The Automatic Millionaire: A Powerful One-Step Plan to Live and Finish Rich

Despite its sensational title, David Bach's The Automatic Millionaire: A Powerful One-step Plan to Live and Finish Rich is not a get-rich-quick...more

Despite its sensational title, David Bach's The Automatic Millionaire: A Powerful One-step Plan to Live and Finish Rich is not a get-rich-quick guide. It's a straightforward march through common-sense personal financial planning that suggests readers "automate" their contributions to retirement and investment vehicles. Bach, in fact, calls his model the "tortoise approach" to becoming wealthy by retirement age. In the early part of the book Bach builds on ideas he established in Smart Women Finish Rich. His core principle is that to succeed you must "Pay Yourself First." In other words, he suggests setting aside a fixed monthly sum before considering what is left for living expenses. The "automatic" part of the title comes from Bach's emphasis on using automated payroll deductions to avoid the temptation of using the money to pay today's bills. Bach insists that "regardless of the size of your pay cheque, you probably already make enough money to become rich." But his claim that his plan requires "no budget, no discipline" is a bit disingenuous. His discussion of the "The Latte Factor" shows that to find money to start a retirement plan, a person with a modest income needs to make an up-front commitment to stop accruing debt and to reduce spending on such "wasteful" items as lattes and cigarettes. In the end The Automatic Millionaire does not offer much that is new for readers already familiar with personal finance basics such as accelerated mortgage payments, "the miracle of compound interest," and the setting up of emergency funds. But, for those just starting with financial planning, Bach provides a host of resources to put recommendations into action. He walks his readers through such fundamentals as shopping for interest rates, creating a balanced retirement portfolio and consolidating debt. Bach's conversational style will make this quick read highly palatable for those daunted by more detailed investment and personal finance titles. --Patrick O'Kelley, Amazon.com   less