Understand the cover image? It’s very subtle

After murdering Jim Randel’s The Skinny On trilogy, we figured no publisher would dare ask us to review a book. But someone did ask, and it’s with great trepidation that we agreed to review it. On the minus side, we expected nothing good. On the plus side, we needed blog post material.

We’ve reviewed several books, and the best one by far was written by a guy who didn’t learn English until his late teens.

Dan Thompson’s Discovering Hidden Treasures: Innovative Strategies For Creating, Retaining, and Transferring Wealth sounds more like the title of a lecture series at The Learning Annex, but let’s reserve judgment until we get to the meat of the book. Which only runs 99 pages and has a superfluous exclamation point on the title page.

99 pages sounds like it’d be easy to get through. If only. And by the way, the innovative strategies Thompson has in mind? Whole life insurance. Sorry to ruin the ending for you.
He doesn’t mention this until near the end of the book, and does whatever he can to euphemize it. Nor does the phrase “life insurance” appear anywhere immediately visible on his company’s website. If a man works that hard to obscure what his business does, and what “wealth strategies” he’s advocating, that tells you more than his book could.

Whole life insurance, in a paragraph: most life insurance policies are for a particular term – 20 years, whatever. Stay alive, and you threw 240 monthly payments down the toilet. Thus the insurance companies invented whole life insurance: the premia are more expensive, and the insurer invests the excess, creating a cash value that it offers to you should you ever want to cancel your policy. Oh, and if you die, your beneficiary doesn’t get the cash.

The problems with this are plentiful and clear. For the increase in what you pay, the insurer incurs no additional risk. That excess is pure profit, but not for you. If the cash value excites you, then you aren’t really insuring, you’re investing. And if you’re going to invest, there are better ways to do it than with a whole life policy that’ll probably pay around 2% annually.

You can’t win with life insurance. Your death, while a foregone conclusion, is hard to predict the date of. In fact the more accurately you can predict the date, the less likely you’ll be to find a company willing to insure you: and the higher the premia you’ll pay.

Oh yeah, Thompson’s book. That the vast majority of self-published authors can’t write is a given. He either didn’t use, or didn’t see the use for, an editor. Six lines in, and we’re already on our 3rd cliché (“…can change on a dime”, “if you don’t like the weather, wait 10 minutes” and “not a cloud in the sky.”) Writers, if you’ve heard it before, don’t use it. Yes, ideally a reader should buy a book for its content, but he still ought to be able to glide rather than wade through it.

The book starts with a first-person story. Thompson was in a thunderstorm as a kid and avoided crashing his bike into a building even though his brakes weren’t working. And – wait for it – our ECONOMY doesn’t have functioning brakes either! Thompson makes every amateur mistake:

• using the passive voice
• being indirect
• capitalizing, hyphenating and pluralizing wherever the mood strikes him
• writing a book without apparently ever having read one
• not reading Stephen King’s On Writing. (If you have any aspirations to being an author, or even a blogger, buy it.)

Assailing the disjointed prose and prolixity of Discovering Hidden Treasures will take up most of the week, so let’s assail the book’s positions and arguments instead. Discovering Hidden Treasures starts off as ephemeral, the kind of book that will only be relevant during a recession – and only this particular recession. Thompson does find his voice in the first chapter when he stops reliving his childhood and starts talking about his topic of expertise. One thing about Thompson, he holds some unconventional beliefs. For instance, he claims that in the 1980s, “long-term” investments meant 1-3 years. When Thompson starts rolling, we get more clichés. Did you know we’re “not in Kansas anymore”? Thompson then helpfully explains where that comes from (The Wizard of Oz.) Which is appropriate, seeing as at least one of his observations comes from another world, or at least another decade:

Today you can barely buy a starter home for $105,000.

You can buy a pretty nice one in Las Vegas for that price. Or Fort Myers. Or Rochester, New York. Or dozens of other cities listed here. (Those are median prices, not entry-level prices.)

It isn’t pedantic to point out that lines like this would drive a more critical book reviewer to alcoholism:

…stocks have lost as much as 30%-50% or more from their highs.

Let’s break down that sentence. So stocks have lost 0-30% from their highs, or 30-50% from their highs, or more than 50% from their highs. In other words, they’ve lost some percentage from their highs. He could have replaced the 30% and 50% figures with 1% and 87%, or 14.3% and 61%, and it wouldn’t have made a difference.

We are seeing a reset in the stock market too, but where it stops nobody knows.

And all this time, we thought the stock market lands at exactly predictable levels on particular days. Thompson’s humor is atrocious, or possibly non-existent:

Many 401(k)s became “201(k)s” after the recent market decline.

It took a few seconds to realize this was an attempt at a joke. The book itself, alas, is not. Thursday we delve into what Thompson’s really selling and why you need to run away from it.