Book Review: “Why Didn’t Anyone Teach Me This?”

July 22nd, 2007 • Related • Filed Under • by admin

As a personal finance writer, I tend to get a lot of financial books, some of them for free! Some of them I read and take in and others end up just sitting on the bookshelf because there’s no compelling reason to pick them up and start reading. I recently received a copy of David Newby’s new book, “Why Didn’t Anyone Teach Me This?” and took the time to read it on a Sunday afternoon. It’s very easy reading and only takes two or three hours to get through the book.

The title of the book was most intriguing, “Why didn’t anyone teach me this?” In the title, Newby is referring to the basic art of handling money. He takes the first couple of chapters to show how bad most American’s financial situations are. Newby does a great job with statistics to bring his point home. One that particularly shocked me (I don’t know the authenticity of this statistic), was that by age 50, the average wealth of most Americans is under $50,000! He argues that we should be teaching our children how to handle money as early as 5th and 6th grade, and I wholeheartedly agree with him. We’re going to be in serious trouble if our financial habits don’t improve as a nation!

Newby then challenges us to go against the grain and be different. He challenges us to not follow the financial habits that we were raised with, and instead do what wealthy people do. You’ll hear a lot of the same advice you’ll hear in other financial books, but it’s still good advice regardless of where it comes, things such as pay off your debts, live on less than you make, diversify your income streams, and the like.

Later on in the book Newby begins to start discussing investments and building wealth. He contends that mutual funds aren’t the best investments citing how all of the people who made money in the market in the late 90’s lost most of it in the dot-com crash and the recession following the September 11th terrorist attacks. Newby instead argues that one should build business systems and create intellectual property and license it, much in the same way that Robert Kiyosaki does in Rich Dad Poor Dad. Newby gives a lot of examples of how people have become independently wealthy by creating business systems, but in the end it’s up to you to come up with your method of creating true wealth.

The book contains a lot of good information for the personal finance reader, but there are also some questionable pieces of advice given in the investment section. Newby doesn’t do a very good job of factoring in the risk that people are taking in the investment types that Newby recommends. We know that investing in mutual funds over a long period of time creates wealth every single time, this definitely isn’t the case when investing in real estate and trying to create a business.

If you’ve enjoyed the books “Think and Grow Rich” or “Rich Dad Poor Dad,” you’ll likely enjoy Newby’s latest book, “Why Didn’t Anyone Teach Me This?” You won’t find some new magic financial nugget in this book, but it dares you to be different and we could use a lot more of that in the world today.