The Coffeehouse Investor: How to Build Wealth, Ignore Wall Street, and Get On with Your Life

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.

THE COFFEEHOUSE INVESTOR is written for those of us who recognize the importance of the investment process to achieve our financial goals but don't want to take a lot of time from family, careers, and recreational passions to obsess on the matter. This is a book that can be easily read in a couple of sittings. In fact, the book's brevity is a function of its message. Commit to a few basic investment strategies and "get on with your life". For the author those life passions include cooking and mountain climbing, so you will want to indulge him a bit (bite?) to digest the book's message. Contrived, perhaps, but I for one will take my tips where I can find them. Schultheis' advice is to diversify our investments, approximate the stock market's long-term results by using index funds, and save. These are themes that other investment writers have worked in detail, but a 'coffeehouse investor' is not about overwhelming us with detail. Schultheis chooses his statistical references and charts sparingly, but they are persuasive. Charts showing the average annual returns of large company stocks over a one-year, rolling five-year, and rolling ten-year period in Chapter 2 clearly show how risk in the stock market diminishes over time. On the subject of savings, I recommend his 'retirement worksheet' in Chapter 7 as a good working model. Why index funds? The majority of actively managed funds under-perform the benchmark indexes, and that's before annual expenses, management fees, and taxes resulting from portfolio turnover. Investing as equity owners in the stock market is ultimately an investment in the "collective" creativity of our fellow human beings. The best way to participate is to 'buy the market', which is the collective sum of all our entrepreneurial efforts, mirrored in an index fund, and avoid single stock ownership except with the "fun" share (say, 5 to 15%) of our assets. No reason why investing shouldn't have a fun component too. Schultheis wants us to ignore Wall Street's muddled, self-interested message that tells us to be long-term investors, and then stimulates an environment of short-term "stuff", "hot stocks and cool mutual funds", and a "switch-to-get-rich mentality". Books by William Bernstein, Larry E. Swedroe, Charles D. Ellis, Richard A. Ferri, and others detail in greater depth the reasoning behind asset allocation, index investing, and saving for retirement, but THE COFFEEHOUSE INVESTOR will reach a large segment of the investing public who might otherwise be occupied with family, career, and recreational priorities and miss the opportunity to embrace these important investment ideas.

Es un libro simple y bien escrito. El concepto es claro y lo sustenta con números. Me sirvió para decidir conceptualmente qué hacer con mis inversiones financieras

Großartiges Buch - ist auch mit etwas weniger Englischkentnissen relativ leicht zu lesen.Das Buch hat wahrscheinlich mein Leben verändert.

One of the most simple yet profound philosophy of investing. It is a fabulous read with the author sharing his thoughts and views on investing as just one part of our life and how we can be good at it without spending our life on managing it. A must read investment and life management book for all. The author is so confident on his principle that he didn't need to write another book to strengthen his advice. That is conviction for you. Don't miss reading this and possibly reread this for your good.

For anyone familiar with John C. Bogle or Fred Schwed's fantastic 'Where are the Customer's Yachts?', the Coffeehouse Investor philosophy will be nothing other than practical, data-backed common sense.For those unfamiliar with the realities of the investment landscape, Bill Schultheis' will come off as a true guru. In a field that may appear to the layperson more as alchemy than a safe place to build wealth, The New Coffeehouse Investor outlines very clearly how to balance a portfolio to manage risk, minimise fees and even find the cash to invest in the first place.Required reading for new investors, plain and simple.

J'avais déjà acheté plusieurs livres sur investissement personnel. C'est un premier qui présente une facilité de lecture surprenante. L'auteur explique une méthode de gestion de portofolio perso possible de réaliser par un non-professionnel (il faut créer un compte bancaire tout de même). On voit bien ses idées défiler au fil des chapitres. Adapté pour un débutant d'investissement comme moi. Le niveau de l'anglais n'est pas très difficile et on arrive bien à le lire dans un coffeehouse.