Automatic Wealth For Grads (review)
Michael Masterson, Automatic Wealth for Grads… And Anyone Else Just Starting Out (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2006), 238pp. 5/5
Essential financial advice — for everyone.
Do you wish you could be rich? Of course you do. Everyone does. Automatic Wealth for Grads is nine chapters of readable and homely financial advice that will change your life for the better if you haven’t learned its lessons already (and you probably haven’t).
I cannot stress highly enough the importance of Masterson’s basic lesson: always spend less than you earn, and invest the surplus wisely. In mid-2004, when I was still a “poor student,” I had saved $8,000 in cash, squirrelled away in a high-interest deposit at around 6%p.a. At age 23, my money was already making me more money; about $40 a month. If I had that money right now, I’d have the deposit for a loan on a very modest studio apartment. But I blew it. I used some of it to pay off credit card debt, and then continued to spend on the credit card. I then spent $4,000 on an overpriced Powerbook G4, and thousands more moving to Japan. By November 2005, I was $11,300 in debt. In two years, my net worth had fallen 241 percent! And not because I couldn’t control my spending. No, that’s something I’m very good at. But because I was foolish enough to believe that if I spent beyond my means while young, I’d make loads of cash in the future and be able to pay it all back easily.
It’s not easy. At 17%p.a., $11,300 in credit card debt will cost you almost $200/month in interest. You pay back $100/week, and you’ll still only be $200 ahead at the end of the month. Maybe if you were earning around $40,000 a year after tax, as I was in Japan, you can save $1,000 a month, but even then, it’ll still take over a year to pay the debt off, taking interest into account. I’ll get back to zero debt some-time around July 2007. In the meantime: PAIN. Spending more than you earn is madness. Don’t go there. Ever.
Maybe it sounds obvious, but most people never really get the lesson that the money you save makes more money for you. Even if you think you get it, you need to beat yourself around the head with the idea to make sure you don’t forget it like I did.
Quite aside from that, though, Masterson has very important advice for graduates in another area, and that’s the enterprise of finding work. Unless you’ve been lucky enough to plan ahead for your employment future and have secured a job with good advancement and earnings growth prospects by joining a graduate program, you’re likely to find deciding on a job you like, and getting it, is a difficult thing. Masterson proposes that you treat job-hunting as a direct marketing exercise. The idea is that you’re selling yourself, as a product, to a customer (your prospective employer) who has particular needs he wants fulfilled, needs that you can answer. And it’s an idea that will transform and focus the way you present yourself. This was the point that caught my eye when I was leafing through Automatic Wealth for Grads, and the one that brought me back to buy it even when I ought to have put the purchase price in the bank. But I’m betting that $35.95 is going to make me hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Masterson caps the book off with more home-style wisdom on the subject of “Living Rich, Starting Tomorrow.” His simple, sound advice for living well, indeed, for living like a billionaire, is to keep one’s demands modest, and to luxuriate in and be grateful for the fruits of your own prudent financial management. When I was just starting my PhD, a colleague (now Dr Lachlan Macdowall) giving a lecture on mass consumption told a class I was tutoring this: “the Coke you buy is the same as what a millionaire buys. More money won’t buy you a better Coke.” And he was right. Masterson repeats this insight: “The way you dress, the way you eat and drink—and even the home you live in—can be as good as any billionaire’s.” And he’s right, too. In a way, Automatic Wealth for Grads is about learning how to make use of the opportunities available in a capitalist society to build wealth through hard, smart work and sound financial management. But it also reminds us that because capitalism optimises the use of resources and stimulates human enterprise, it has led to a situation where the modestly wealthy now live better than all the kings of yesterday. By simply living below your means, for your whole life, you can build wealth enough to enjoy the finest luxuries in human history, in the ease of an early retirement.
Start heading there now. Start by reading this book.
(Those who want to save themselves A$35.90 might prefer to borrow Automatic Wealth for Grads from a library, or read a concise version of the same advice from John J. Brennan, chairman of Vanguard).
The Da Vinci Code (review)
Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code (2003; repr. London: Corgi, 2005), 593pp. 3/5
This pacey but overexcitable thriller lets itself down by claiming to be more than fiction.
By now The Da Vinci Code has well and truly been cracked. Reading the tale of how religious symbologist Robert Langdon races against time, accused of murder, to acquit himself and save the secrets of the holy grail from Catholic fundamentalists Opus Dei and a mysterious villain working behind the scenes, should offer few surprises. The secret of the grail, as Brown has it, is of course that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were lovers and companions, spawning a bloodline that continues into the present.
What’s most surprising about the Da Vinci code is just how surprised the characters act when they find out the secret. Langdon, the book’s hero, a Harvard Professor, is suitably nonchalant, having been in on it the whole time. But, like slack-jawed American fundamentalist yokels, just about everybody else concerned is completely flabbergasted when they hear the truth. That Brown treats the Jesus/Magdalene love story as earth-shatteringly scandalous has undoubtedly prompted overly pious Christians of many different stripes to take more offense at the book than they ought. These ideas are not new. Quite apart from the inspiration that Brown took from The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, revisionist Christian scholars like Barbara Thiering and Bishop John Spong have been exploring the theological ramifications of the Jesus/Magdalene story for years. Readers: be aware that these ideas are not original, and not shocking. Retain your composure.
Even when one knows the secret, though, The Da Vinci code is a compelling read. Though his prose is, well, prosaic, his story is more tightly plotted, and his sentences more solidly constructed, than those of that other great blockbuster-writer of recent times, J.K. Rowling. Yet Brown does not have Rowling’s gift for evoking magic. The Da Vinci code disappoints us at its ending by leaving the grail hidden. Langdon finds out exactly where it is, but declines to disturb it. Just as in the Indiana Jones movies, the powerful religious artefact that draws people and events into a whirlwind around it recedes into obscurity at the finale, never to trouble the world again. But where in Indiana Jones we get to see the magic of the ancient world at work, melting Nazi faces, helping Indian priests pull hearts out of helpless victims’ chests, or turning Nazis into skeletons (yes, Nazis again), in The Da Vinci Code Brown is too anxious to make his story seem real to ever let magic of any kind, miraculous or merely emotional, enter the equation.
And this is where Brown really trips himself up, by making false claims that parts of his story accurately reflect historical fact. A documentary I recently saw, narrated by Tony Robinson, concluded that there was no credible evidence that the Priory of Sion, a secret brotherhood Brown credits with guarding the secrets of the grail, ever existed. Yet Brown makes this claim: “Fact: The Priory of Sion … is a real organisation.” (15) Brown also claims that “all descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents and secret rituals in this novel are accurate,” (15) but the Rosslyn Chapel’s “official web-site”: notes that Brown’s description of a Star-of-David-shaped pathway worn into the chapel’s floor by visitors is inaccurate.
It’s a shame, because by leaving his claims to historical veracity out, Brown could have led readers on a merry chase without exposing himself to the criticism that he misleads his readers. Not knowing what in the book is real or not makes The Da Vinci Code a sort of Thomas-Pynchon-Lite, The Crying of Lot 49 played straight, aiming to entertain rather than to befuddle its reader. And while Brown might not draw his readers into dizzying conspiracies that tempt the reader to wonder what is real, he’s far better than Pynchon at inviting his readers to learn the truths behind his tale, because he preserves the idea that there is, indeed, a truth to be found.
Brown educates his readers on the workings of Interpol, the geography of Paris, the art of Leonardo Da Vinci, the agencies of the Vatican, the Fibonacci sequence, Swiss depository banking, and myriad other points of fact. While one would be a fool to take his book as an encyclopedia, it is in its own way informative, and it is, more powerfully still, an inducement to learn. A fine achievement.
Castle in the Air (review)
Diana Wynne Jones, Castle in the Air (1990; London: Collins, 2001), 285pp. ★★★ (3 stars)
Pleasant but insubstantial sequel to Howl’s Moving Castle, with an Arabian Nights flavour.
This sequel to Howl’s Moving Castle begins at quite a distance from its predecessor’s very English setting in the Kingdom of Ingary. Its hero, Abdullah, hails from a world rich in the middle-eastern clichés of the Arabian Nights, and takes his sweet time making it to an intersection with the characters of Howl’s Moving Castle in Ingary’s capital, Kingsbury.
Castle in the Air has the same whimsical and random air as Howl’s Moving Castle, albeit with less sense of their being any substance behind it. There is, however, some beautiful prose, such as this description of the eponymous’ castle’s surroundings:
When the carpet bobbed up lighter and they had a chance to look around, they gasped again. For here were the islands and promontories and bays of dim gold that Abdullah had seen in the sunset, spreading out from beside them into the far silver distance, where they lay hushed and still and enchanted like a vista of paradise itself. The pellucid waves broke on the cloud shore with only the faintest of whispers, which seemed to add to the silence. (215)
It is sprinkled, too, with wry womanly wisdom such as the observation that “men who [eschew kissing and] do nothing but make fine speeches make very poor husbands.” (249) But although the feminine strength of Flower-in-the-Night recalls Sophie’s elderly tenacity in Howl’s Moving Castle, this book is far less rich in the wisdom department, and the poorer for being without the earlier book’s romantic triangles.