If you take a walk down to the local bricks and mortar version of Amazon.com, chances are you’ll find a number of different books about money. Now we all know that we should pay close attention to our finances, but who has the time? We’ll be lucky to read one book a year about money, and “The Automatic Millionaire” should probably be one of them. David Bach’s latest non-fiction work will teach you how to become a millionaire and can almost guarantee that you will become one.

No, there’s no magic tricks in this book that will teach you how to become a millionaire without any work or sacrifice, but it will make it happen. It’s a combination of good old common sense and mathematics. Bach suggests a “tortoise” approach of becoming wealthy. This means automatically investing a small amount of money over a long period of time so that you can become wealthy.

A lot of people who are smart with money would respond to the idea mentioned in this book by saying “duh.” Most of us already know that a mix of dollar cost averaging and manageable risk is a great way to become wealthy and probably think that we don’t need to read this book. Don’t worry, there’s something in this book for you too. We all know the general idea and basic mathematics behind it, however Bach does an excellent job at showing us how to find extra money to put away in investments for the future, as well provides suggestions to make your investments automatically to make up for shortcomings in our personal behavior, which is why most people fail when planning for retirement. We all want to put money away, but a lot of us never get around to it. Bach shows us how to automate our investments so that is no longer an issue

One of the major points that David Bach stresses in the Automatic Millionaire is that of the “latte factor.” The notion is that we need to cut down on those small expenses such as a morning coffee or a lunch trip to McDonalds which for one day is not a lot of money, but over the course of a year can add up to be a couple of thousand dollars. Bach gives great suggestions as to how you can find your “latte factor” so that you have some more money to save for retirement. For example, I couldn’t get by without my morning pop for the longest time, and eventually did try to give it up. That didn’t work out so well, but I have cut back on the amount of pop I drink dramatically, and instead of paying $1.00 at the pop machine, I can get 24 oz bottles for about 35 cents at the grocery store when they’re on sale. That action alone will easily save me $200 this year.

There’s a lot of good information on how to attain wealth and do so by overcoming the shortcomings in personal behavior that stop most people from becoming financially independent. If you’ve never read any of Bach’s other books, the Automatic Millionaire is definitely worth picking up.