Book review of MONEY WISE: Timeless Lessons on Building Wealth by Deepak Shenoy

 

Review by Manish Dhawan.

 

To start off, I loved the readability of the book. No Shashi Throor English to complicate and confuse audience.  He uses Simple, conversational English to bring home the point.

And what is the Point. Deepak expounded the fact that biggest factor in compounding your money is the time component. Let it be. Leave it, don’t finger it. It doesn’t matter how small you start, important is to keep at it and don’t stop it.

I will be honest that I am a touch biased in writing a review of this book because I share the same view point on the topic of “Becoming rich”.

Like Deepak, I strongly believe that you are suppose to get rich in your chosen domain, stock market investment is done to augment that and maintain that richness by running faster than inflation, that’s it. The moment you try to get rich via stock markets, you start doing some real dumb stuff resulting in lagging the index, if not incurring losses.

Ofcourse if your domain is stock market itself; then it’s a different story. Actually, even then you need a starting base capital.

One thing that intrigued me was an example he created, a hypothetical protagonist named Ansh and his bucket list to go to Croatia.

 

I have just 01 question, Who the fuck goes to Croatia for vacation. (His ex girl friend lives there may be) Lol

 

Jokes apart, Deepak tried to instill a common sense practice of always keeping 6x your monthly expenses in a bank a/c as emergency fund and NOT COUNT that amount in your networth calculations. Just forget about that amount and let it earn savings bank returns.

Book is full of these small nuggets of financial prudence.

 

In itself, all these small nuggets mean very little, but combined together, you start developing a mental framework of how to think about life insurance, fixed income, mutual funds, etfs, index funds, health insurance, emergency fund, will planning, stock investing, gambling a/c,.

Basically an entire gamut of personal finance nuggets wrapped in 01 book.

 

 

 

 

I also appreciate Deepak’s sense of humor in the book, Its not as loud as mine and not so low to go unnoticed.  He hits the right chord with the audience.

This book also takes you through history of Indian stock markets keeping you abreast with the mutual fund scams and other frauds. Everyone should know their past, that is what present is based upon.

In this book Deepak also shared an interesting formula to calculate how much money you need to retire comfortably considering you have Charlie munger genes,

Rest of the book reads like a blog or a series of blogs detailing various stock related topics and common areas where you can get suckered into doing something stupid.

 

 

 

It is an easy read and with blog sized articles, Deepak keeps sharing 01 important lesson after another, again no rocket science if you consider each in isolation, but these small nuggets all add up creating a mental framework on how to invest or what to avoid.

I was able to read the entire book in 01 sitting and would like to gift it to anyone who doesn’t know where to start.

Book is available on Amazon