A New Personal Finance Book
from Moshe Milevsky
September 2, 2008
Moshe A. Milevsky, the Toronto-based finance professor, author and journalist who is known for writing about weighty investment and insurance topics with wit and humor, has published a new book that should help both advisers and advanced laypeople plan for retirement.
The title is Are You a Stock or a Bond? (Financial Times Press, 2009). And while its subtitle--"Create Your Own Pension Plan for a Secure Financial Future"--indicates its basic practicality, the book is clearly more than a how-to for complete beginners.
It's a plain-spoken introduction to many of the complex financial concepts that Milevsky, a professor at York University, writes about in greater detail in his magazine columns, journal articles and in his textbook, The Calculus of Retirement Income (Cambridge, 2006).
"This book argues that your approach to financial risk should not be based on a psychological mindset based on your temper du jour, but instead on the composition of your entire personal balance sheet. My main message is that YOU must start approaching your financial situation in a more holistic manner," he writes in his preface. Elsewhere he says, "You must learn to think of yourself as a small company."
"In the past, a financial portfolio of stocks and bonds was more of a perk than a necessity. The investment account was a retirement income supplement or perhaps a part-time hobby. Today, your stocks and bonds--very broadly defined--will become the means by which you will be able to finance and support the last 20 or 30 years of your life." The title refers to his definition of human capital--the income from your job--as either a stock or a bond.
Are You a Stock or a Bond? is currently available at amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com, strandbooks.com and elsewhere.
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