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If you've read one money book, you haven't read them all, but you've covered about 90% of the field.
The problem is that good financial advice doesn't change much year to year. Many of the books that purport to provide fresh insights are really just recycling the old -- or careening off into fiscal insanity ("Make a fortune through day trading!" "Become a millionaire at 16 through whole life insurance policies!").
Still, every once in a while, a book comes along that does say something new. Here are five recently published entries that would be worthy additions to your bookshelf:
"Gotcha Capitalism: How Hidden Fees Rip You Off Every Day -- and What You Can Do About It" by Bob Sullivan
If you buy one money book this year, this should be it.
Sullivan, an MSNBC reporter who writes the Red Tape Chronicles blog, details how hidden fees and fine print have replaced honest competition in corporate America. He shows how companies spend billions of dollars to research ways to confuse and deceive their customers. Instead of playing fair, many of the businesses we deal with every day have learned it pays to play foul.
"Companies under pressure to keep advertised prices low have seized on trickery to pump profits up," Sullivan writes. "The most successful firms are now the ones that hide their prices best: under asterisks, deep inside terms and conditions, in fees they call taxes, bills that come months after the fact, even around dark corners in auto dealerships where the manager's office is."
You know it's bad, but Sullivan lays out how this "gotcha capitalism" is "our new economic system, replacing our former system, the free-market economy." The good news is that he also outlines ways to fight back while making a compelling case that American consumers have been left essentially unprotected for far too long.
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"Get Satisfied: How Twenty People Like You Found the Satisfaction of Enough," edited by Carol Holst
If you think simple living means retreating to a hut on a mountainside, you're in for a pleasant surprise. The 20 people whose stories are included in "Get Satisfied" for the most part live in regular houses in urban or suburban neighborhoods across the country.
Many of these folks sought out a saner way of life; others had simplicity thrust upon them. One of the authors started down the simple-living path, for example, only when he and his wife couldn't find a nanny who would enter their cluttered home. His wife became an involuntary stay-at-home mom, their income dropped substantially, and they began to figure out how to live happily on, and with, less.
How much people have scaled back and how they define the concept of "enough" varies dramatically from one story to the next.
"Get Satisfied" is a project of Simple Living America, a nonprofit organization that promotes simplicity. You can learn more at the Get Satisfied Web site.
"Living Rich by Spending Smart: How to Get More of What You Really Want" by Gregory Karp
I was asked to review an early version of Karp's manuscript, since we share a publisher. I thought I knew just about every way to trim a budget, but Karp, who writes the "Spending Smart" column that runs in Tribune newspapers nationwide, presented some ideas and strategies I hadn't considered. I especially like his concept of cutting painlessly by focusing on the acronym FIT, for food, insurance and telecommunications.
Karp introduced me to sites such as The Coupon Mom and The Grocery Game, which help you take maximum advantage of newspaper coupons with a minimum of clipping. He also clued me in to the savings I was missing by not using my auto club and other membership cards, something I wrote about in "Discounts hiding in your wallet."
Continued: Two more books to consider