The Coffeehouse Investor: How to Build Wealth, Ignore Wall Street, and Get On with Your Life Paperback – Illustrated, January 29, 2013

I was pretty impressed with this book. I give it an A+.As hard and complicated as Wall Street tries to make investing..... to make you think you need a broker or active mutual fund manager, the steps for successful investing are very basic. This book does hit most of the basic steps correctly.#1 is to live below your means so you can save at least 10% of your gross each year and invest it. This sounds easy, but it apparently is not since the average U.S. household credit card debt is now around $8,000 saving rates are below 1%, and average household net worth is below $100K. The book should have mentioned the classic book The Richest Man in Babylon with regards to the merits of living below your means so you have money to invest.#2 is to use automatic investment so you pay yourself first. If you set up an automatic way of investing, then you can't spend money you don't see. After all, the U.S. government adopted automatic payroll deduction to pay income taxes right after WWII because it was concerned people would not save to pay their tax bill. The government using automatic payroll deduction to assure they always get their share of your money, so why not use this method to keep some of your money for yourself? If you use automatic investment, you get the advantages of dollar cost averaging as well. Automatic savings would have been a good addition to this book.#3 is to invest your savings in stocks and use low cost index funds for your investments. The book got it right in saying that stock brokers are not your friends. Often their objective is to move your money into their hands per the classic book Where are the Customer's Yachts?#4 is to focus on asset allocation, not which stocks or mutual funds to pick. This book does an excellent job of explaining asset allocation.As a yardstick measurement of how well one saves and invests, the book should have referenced The Millionaire Next Door's expected net worth formula of 1/10 of your age times your income. This gives you a frame of reference to how well you have saved and invested.A visit to this book's web site reveals how successful a good asset allocation has been the last 5 years. A good asset allocation helps weather the storms we occasionally see in the U.S. stock market......like 3 down years in a row in 2000-2002. The example portfolio in this web site includes a 10% allocation to the real estate area using aVanguard REIT.All-in-all, a great primer on successful investing strategies. I would suggest companion books to supplement this book including The Richest Man in Babylon, Bogle on Mutual Funds, The Millionaire Next Door, The 4 Pillars of Investing, A Random Walk Down Wall Street, Wealth of Experience: Real Investors on what Works and What Doesn't.

This is a very concisely written book about making the investing process as simple as possible via the indexing approach. I finished reading this book in one night. The examples sited by Bill Schultheis are interesting, often quite amusing.The key to successful investing is to follow a few very important rules, such as maintaining diversification and balance, paying attention to cost, and stick to the plan for the long term. Bill is an excellent teacher. He lays out the arguments with intuitive evidence that it becomes very easy to "get it".The topic of asset allocation was a bit sparsely covered. This is the only weakness I could see for an otherwise excellent introductory book on investing.

This book was recommended to me by Robert Clyatt, the author of another very good book, Work Less, Live More, for those who might be interested in early retirement and semi-retirement. My wife and I did retire a bit earlier than most folks, and we found Bob's book at about the same time. This isn't a review of Bob's book, but it is because of Bob's book that we began looking into how we could better understand and simplify our investment portfolio and reduce the fees, taxes, etc. and just learn how to manage our way through retirement making our saving last the rest of our lives. That lead me to read this book.If you are already investing and or are confounded by how immensely complicated investing seems to be. If you are looking to begin investing and suffering from the paralysis of analysis. Then you are in a similar place that I have been for years. Most of us come to count on "financial advisers" to direct our investments, because it does seem overwhelming and we're pretty busy raising children, working, etc. Investing in the stock market seems to involve a knowledge and mystical quality far beyond our grasp.The "NEW" Coffeehouse Investor, blows that smoke screen apart and shows you what commonsense investing (not gambling) looks like. In his simple to understand, not boring, book the author effectively illustrates how and why we should all do this and in a most cost effective and safe way. Finally the clouds are parting and I feel empowered to move out on my own.

This book could work if the goal is to introduce an investor to the concept of efficient markets and index investing. However it is a little too laid back and short on content. It is easily skimmed, and summarizes the major points of how you can't beat the market, how indexing and low expenses work. However I doubt that someone serious about revamping their portfolio or changing their investing style would be convinced from this short book to do the overhaul. I would say that at the minimum, this book would whet your appetite to explore further. Three books I would recommend are Bernstein's Four Pillars of Investing, Rick Ferri's All About Asset Allocation, and John Bogle's The Little Book of Common Sense Investing. These books furnish the investor with the education, the rationale, the evidence, studies and statistics, as well as the practical how-to's of assembling a personal portfolio and sticking to it. Otherwise, someone reading the Coffeehouse Investor would just treat Indexing as another investment fad, and abandon it when the next bear market hits, not understanding risk/reward, diversification, correlation, asset allocation and rebalancing.