Safely Prosperous or Really Rich: Choosing Your Personal Financial Heaven

CONTENTS

Foreword

Introduction

Book I The Safe Road to Prosperity

Section I The Dumb Mistakes Almost Everyone Makes with Their Money

1 Two Tracks, Two Heavens

The two very different roads to Safe Prosperity or Real Riches

2 Worshipping Mammon

The bad trade-offs of loving money more than God, family or country, and how to avoid them. How to have both money and true happiness.

3 The Alien in Your Chest

Compound interest can be your best friend or your worst enemy. It is a two-edged sword—much more powerful than you thought.

4 The Great American Lie

Pretending to be rich by selling your future to buy the big house, the big SUV, the big home theater, the big boat, while living a life of quiet desperation when the monthly bills come in

5 How to Prosper by Earning 15 Percent in a 1-Percent World

In early 2003, interest rates on riskless investments fell to 1 percent or less, torpedoing compounding programs below the waterline. Savvy investors still compounded their portfolios at 10 percent or even 20 percent in investments that were almost as riskless.

6 Social Security, the Ponzi Chain Letter

Why you would be much better off by not counting on Social Security, the biggest scam in the known universe

Section II Blowing Your Money in the Investment Markets: The Turnpike to Financial Hell

7 Listening to Wall Street

Wall Street's conventional wisdom has been 180° wrong almost forever. Here's why, and how to tell.

8 The Bigger-Fool Theory of Investing

The stock market bubble of the late 1990s ...