Lazy Man and Money

  • Blog
  • Home
  • About
    • What I’m Doing Now
  • Consumer Protection
    • Is Le-vel Thrive a Scam?
    • Is Jusuru a Scam?
    • Is Beachbody’s Shakeology a Scam?
    • Is “It Works” a Scam?
    • Is Neora (Nerium) a Scam?
    • Youngevity Scam?
    • Are DoTERRA Essential Oils a Scam?
    • Is Plexus a Scam?
    • Is Jeunesse a Scam?
    • Is Kangen Water a Scam?
    • ViSalus Scam Exposed!
    • Is AdvoCare a Scam?
  • Contact
  • Archive

The Best Personal Finance/FIRE Book You’ve Never Heard Of

October 29, 2018 by Lazy Man 7 Comments

If You Made A Million

You probably know that I’m not a fan of clickbait titles. That’s why I didn’t use a clickbait title.

Let’s make a deal. If you’ve heard of this personal finance book, you stick around as a reader. If not, I’m okay if you click away angry and never come back.

Have you ever heard of If You Made a Million by David M. Schwartz? It’s illustrated by Steven Kellogg who happens to have written and illustrated one of my wife’s favorite books, The Mysterious Tadpole. My wife read it when she was a little girl. Our own kids are very familiar with Alphonse.

By now you may have realized that If You Made a Million is not about helping adults understand money. It’s about helping children. But please don’t click away just yet. If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the last 2 years, it’s that adults can learn quite a bit from children’s books.

Let’s dig into what makes If You Made a Million so special. (By the way, I was not paid to write this review. I simply saw it at the library. I will however make a small commission if you purchase the book from the above link.)

If You Made a Million

Before I get started with the review, let’s get a very important number out there: 1989. That’s when If You Made a Million was written. Yes, the book is as old as Taylor Swift. It is also three years older than Your Money or Your Life, which is often considered the first FIRE book. It was also written 6 years before Suze Orman wrote her first book.

Being old doesn’t make things good. (This blog is living proof of that.) Let’s get to the actual content.

Overall, the book takes a child on a journey of earning and spending money. It starts with feeding a fish a penny, which will allow you to buy one of a shyster’s pebbles. It continues to educate children about coins with increasingly more difficult jobs and ways to spend the money. These first few pages are fairly boring, but they go quickly since there’s only a sentence or two on each page. It’s an important to build that foundation.

Once you get into earning a dollar, the book tells the story of compound interest. Here’s the first one:

Compound Interest

At ten dollars, the compound interest story gets a little more exciting:

Compound Interest

At one thousand dollars, the idea of checks and how they work is introduced. It’s simply much easier than carrying around a wheelbarrow of coins or even a bunch of bills.

At fifty thousand dollars, we learn about how mortgages work:

Mortgages

There’s a little more to mortgages. Specifically it shows how you keep giving money to the bank year after year for 40 years. The illustrations show the old man still physically bringing his check to the bank for his castle payment. It also explains that, this time, you are the one paying interest to the bank.

Finally we get to the FIRE part of the book. It only takes six sentences. The first four are:

“If you have some very expensive plans, you may have to take on a tough job that pays well.
If you think ogre-taming would be an exciting challenge, you can have fun and make a great deal of money, too.
Of course, you may not enjoy taming obstreperous ogres or building bulky bridges or painting purple pots.
Enjoying your work is more important than money, so you should look for another job or make less expensive plans.”

Remember what I wrote before about adults learning from children’s books? That last sentence is “Exhibit A” of that.

I promised you six sentences. Here’s two more:

FIRE

Did you catch the financial independence message there? Having that kind of passive income gives you the option to not work at all, but maybe you should choose the work that interests you because doing nothing could be boring.

There’s a quick concluding page after that to get children’s minds thinking about what they’d do if they made a million dollars.

Final Thoughts on If You Made a Million

I found it surprising how well the math from 1989 holds up today. Obviously the banks aren’t paying 5.25% interest like the examples. However, we often work with similar (or even larger) interest rates assuming more risk and different asset allocations.

Also, the one million number at the end might not seem like enough today. However, it is $2,034,157.94 in 2018 dollars. You’ll often see $2 million as the target number for FIRE, so the one million number from 1989 is solid.

After the story ends, there’s a significant section of “A Note from the Author.” Here you get about 1500 words on each of the themes in the book: why money?, how banks work, interest and compound interest, checks and checking accounts, loans, and income tax.

Finally there’s a huge explanation on how he calculated some of the amazing numbers used in the book. These are things like a million dollars in pennies will stack 95 miles high and a million dollars in quarters would way as much as a whale. If you love geeky math, this is fun, but you could choose to skip it and still get all the financial lessons.

Now that you have a good understanding of If You Made a Million, I have two questions:

1. Are you going to live up to the deal and stick around as a reader?
2. Did you think my title was clickbait or just spot-on analysis?

Let me know the answers in the comments.

Email (and share) This

  • Email
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Pinterest

Related

Filed Under: Book Review, Financial Independence Tagged With: financial independence

SIGN UP NOW FOR MONEY TIPS AND A CHANCE TO WIN $25 MONTHLY

Comments

  1. Jim Wang says

    October 29, 2018 at 2:47 pm

    I think you’ll find many of the same money principles echoed through the ages, just an issue of how its packaged for the flavor of the era. I’m not knee deep in the financial independence movement but being frugal, saving up money, and then living off the nest egg is not a wholly new concept.

    Cute book too!

    Reply
    • Lazy Man says

      October 29, 2018 at 3:57 pm

      Yep, it does go back to Ben Franklin and probably before. I particularly like this package because it is brief, fun (wizards!), and so easy that maybe even my kids’ school will cover it.

  2. Steve says

    October 29, 2018 at 3:42 pm

    Am I allowed to stick around even if I didn’t hear of it before? My 8 year old has recently been curious about money, and I’m not sure if my description of a mutual fund really sunk in, but I’m going to take this out of the library to read with her.

    Reply
    • Lazy Man says

      October 29, 2018 at 3:54 pm

      Oops, maybe I worded that wrong… I’ll have to look at that. It was supposed to be that you have to stick around if you haven’t heard of it before. I think it might be more appropriate for an 8 year old than it was for my Kindergartener. I think time and money is covered in first or second grade.

    • Steve says

      October 29, 2018 at 4:27 pm

      We’ll see. She’s also been asking about mortgages, salary, and other money concepts.

  3. Joe says

    October 30, 2018 at 10:12 am

    That’s pretty cool. I’ll check it out from the library for our kid. Yes, the library has a copy.

    Reply
  4. Jonathan R says

    December 10, 2018 at 2:39 am

    I have decided to stick around because although this book seems to reproduce the canons and money habits that we already know about FIRE, the graphical/comic-type representation impressed me. The old nature (1989!!!!) definitely adds to the reasons why I should own one.

    Might be yet another book about money tips but at least it will be the “best finance FIRE book I have heard of.”

    Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

As Seen In…

Join and Follow

RSS Feed
RSS Feed

Follow Me on Pinterest

Search The Site

Recent Comments

  • Joe on The Cost of Summer Camp (2023 Edition)
  • Lazy Man on Odds and Ends Update
  • Joe on Odds and Ends Update
  • Lazy Man on Odds and Ends Update
  • Josh on Odds and Ends Update

Please note that we may have a financial relationship with the companies mentioned on this site. We frequently review products or services that we have been given access to for free. However, we do not accept compensation in any form in exchange for positive reviews, and the reviews found on this site represent the opinions of the author.


© Copyright 2006-2023 · Perfect Plan Publishing, Inc. · All Rights Reserved · Privacy Policy · A Narrow Bridge Media Design