Months later, this book is still garbage III

June 10, 2011

Reading 3 reviews of Jim Randel books is more entertaining than reading even one of the actual books. Last year Financial Highway asked us to review one of his books, then another, then a third. Unfortunately, he’s written more. Fortunately, we weren’t asked to review the remainder.

We call this Recycle Friday at Control Your Cash – a reworking of an old post – but even one of our Friday posts entails far more work than Randel put into his Tōhoku earthquake of a book series. Enjoy:

The Skinny On The Housing Crisis is the fattest title in Jim Randel’s The Skinny on series, running 269 pages. The cover blurb is written by Connecticut attorney general and U.S. Senate hopeful Dick Blumenthal, the guy who said:

In Vietnam we had to endure taunts and insults, and no one said, “Welcome home”

despite never having served in Vietnam. (Note: Incredibly, Blumenthal won his election. Handily. He should have gone further with his campaign-trail prevarication. Why not conjure up a couple of Purple Hearts and a Distinguished Service Medal while he was at it?) That quote is about as dependable as this one:

This book performs an extraordinary public service.

The Skinny On The Housing Crisis was released 2 years ago, and is as dated as a gallon of milk from that time.

I’ve already assailed the childish format of the The Skinny on series, so I won’t repeat it here. This book – along with the five other volumes in the series – chronicles the adventures of a stick-figure couple looking to learn about the financial world. As it’s an illustrated book, Randel uses frame numbers (two to a page) rather than page numbers.

The first 15 or so frames of The Skinny On The Housing Crisis are almost identical to their counterparts in Randel’s equally unreadable The Skinny on Real Estate Investing. Apparently his stick-figure couple watches a lot of late-night infomercials and enjoys repeating conversations.

The book is loaded with punctuation mistakes. As a reviewer, this is annoying. As a reader, it’d break the sale for me if I were thinking about forking over the $13 Randel expects. The Skinny On The Housing Crisis won the Robert Bruss Real Estate Book of the Year award, leaving open the question of whether Paris Hilton’s Confessions of an Heiress was eligible. If it was, it should have beaten The Skinny On The Housing Crisis.

By frame 34, we learn that you shouldn’t use a mortgage lender who works in the same office as a realtor. Randel seems convinced that mortgage brokers are even less ethical than attorneys (Randel’s day job.) One sequence shows a mortgage broker granting a stated income loan to a filthy applicant who claims he clears $300,000 annually. So people shopping for houses told bald-faced lies to brokers, and therefore brokers carry the moral obligation for believing them. As Homer Simpson once helpfully explained to Marge, “It takes two to lie – one to lie, and one to listen.”

Randel’s inability to stay on point is so profound that at several times I checked the frame numbers to confirm that the publisher didn’t bind the pages in the wrong order. Randel does use several panels to explain the concept of second mortgages, which means you should read this before you read its companion volume, The Skinny on Real Estate Investing. In that book he references second mortgages without describing them.

This book is ostensibly intended for rookie audiences, yet Randel insists on introducing unfamiliar terms without defining them. “Mortgage brokerage fee”, for instance. And there it is again, page 68: Randel introduces concepts like “private mortgage insurance” and “loan-to-value (ratio)”, without saying what they are. One sentence later, it’s as if those terms never existed.

Here’s a free one for any aspiring non-fiction writer: assume your reader isn’t as familiar with industry jargon as you are. Randel’s refusal to do this makes for what will be a frustrating read if you attempt to slog through The Skinny On The Housing Crisis. Which you shouldn’t, because buying this book is an investment with a negative return.

Randel assumes the average realtor is only slightly less dishonest than the average mortgage broker, and that there’s no code of realtor ethics, and that a realtor can’t lose her license for violating it. Appraisers are untrustworthy, too: according to Randel they’ll appraise a house for more than its worth, because the mortgage broker who recommends the appraiser wants the house to hit a “target value”.

This makes no sense. Won’t a cheaper house sell faster? So the mortgage broker gets a slightly smaller cut. But he also gets it without working as long, and doesn’t have to worry about ethics violations.

The stick-figure couple buys a house before getting an appraisal, which is insane. There’s no excuse for Randel not pointing out the absurdity of this, and imploring readers to get the appraisal first.

Randel explains that during the real estate crisis, unethical buyers would apply for a loan worth more than the price of a house, give the seller slightly more than his asking price, and pocket the difference. He doesn’t cite any real examples, and besides, this criminal scheme seems like the kind of thing that’d be easy for a lender to figure out. Anyhow, at this point in the book the stick-figure couple’s realtor keeps encouraging them to raise their already fair offer.

Incredibly, a publisher allowed Randel to get away with sentences like

If you are shopping for a loan today, you should check with both mortgage brokers and with banks in order to get a good read on market rates.

Also, if you want to know what the weather’s like, you should go outside and look at the sky.

Randel continues with more unfounded allegations. For instance, people raised their credit scores by becoming “authorized users” of their friends’ credit card accounts. Would you let your friend have unrestricted access to your credit card?

Randel dismisses Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac with 1½ sentences. In a book about the housing crisis. This is like writing a book about World War II and not spending more than 12 words on—you know, the guy. German. Bad facial hair. Murdered lots of Jews.

This isn’t a book so much as it’s a crappily organized middle school research project. Randel borrows from Robert Kiyosaki, Stephen Dubner and Steven Leavitt, and the guy who wrote Confessions of a Subprime Lender. (Another tip for aspiring writers. Titling your book “Confessions of” anything is very original.) Randel even cribs an entire definition from Wikipedia, without taking a few seconds to rewrite it and make it his own. On almost every page, there’s a quote from or a recommendation for another book. Randel should have put these on the cover, and saved people the trouble of opening his weak offering.

While I’m dispensing advice, some more for Randel:

1) It’s not an “ATM machine”. Nor is it “NFL league”, “FAA administration”, or “DIY yourself”.
2) Don’t start a sentence with “you see.” You see, people will find it condescending that you felt the need to tell them to pay attention if your prose is too weak to do it itself.
3) The “brain surgery” metaphor hasn’t been fresh or inventive for about 25 years now, give or take.
4) A possessive takes an apostrophe (Randel’s incompetence). A plural doesn’t (the world has enough Randels). Thank you.

Randel does seem to be one of the few writers who understands the difference between i.e. and e.g.

Here’s the worthwhile information in Randel’s book:

-You can find home price estimates at Zillow. (He doesn’t mention this, but you can find exact sale prices at your county assessor’s website.)
-Your mortgage broker shouldn’t personally receive more than 1% of what you borrow. Of course, this assumes the broker will disclose his fee to you.
-Adjustable-rate mortgages are for idiots, unless you’re the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board and know exactly in which direction interest rates will head.
-Assuming you didn’t read the previous point, there are adjustable-rate mortgages that punish you for paying early.

If Randel was selling this as a history book, fine. Is it really important to know that subprime borrowing led to people occupying houses they couldn’t afford in 2006? If you’ve ever read a news story in the recent past, presumably you know this already.

Filed Under: Bad Examples Tagged With: , , ,

Months later, this book is still garbage II

June 3, 2011

Another Recycle Friday, another book review, another unreadable pamphlet from Jim Randel, another post that originally appeared on Financial Highway. And if you think we’re done, wait until next Friday (although we’ll have plenty more for you before then.)

Last summer we reviewed this “book”. It hasn’t exactly gotten better with age. (Some other books, on the other hand, are timeless classics. And available on Amazon.)

Being sincere isn’t a sufficient condition for writing a self-help book. Jim Randel’s The Skinny On Willpower is yet another installment in the lawyer-cum-author’s The Skinny On series, (childishly) illustrated books that convey the details of time management, networking, success etc., using stick figures.
Seriously.

The Skinny On gimmick boasts that it condenses important material for the busy reader, if you can consider consuming a The Skinny On book to be “reading”. With The Skinny On Willpower, your reviewer has now made it to the end of three The Skinny On books – making him perhaps the only person on the planet to do so while being neither a Rand Publishing employee nor a Randel family member.

The Skinny On Willpower is everything you’ve ever read in a self-help book and can recite after a lobotomy, distilled into a booklet devoid of angle, showmanship or presentation. What distinguishes Randel from other self-help authors? Well, he disdains Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret, which he should. Randel’s just a little more vocal about it than most of us. The content of The Skinny On Willpower is so unremarkable, one can only attack the form. Randel may be an abysmal writer, but he is consistent. The same bugbears in Randel’s other titles are also on display here:

  • plugging other titles in the series in the middle of the book? Check.
  • quoting liberally from as many authors as he can think of? Check.
  • refusing to use contractions, in the faint hope Queen Victoria might buy a copy of the book? Check.
  • self-congratulation, like a line about how football kickers “exercise dominion over harmful thoughts and kick them out of their mind (good pun, huh?)” Check.

Self-help themes are so universal that it’s hard to sound original while writing a self-help book. In the last 20 years, the only inventive works that resounded with this reviewer were Hyrum Smith’s The Ten Natural Laws of Successful Time and Life Management and Harvey Mackay’s Dig Your Well Before You’re Thirsty.  But those books were written by real authors. Even in this necessarily derivative genre, The Skinny On Willpower is as derivative as it gets. If there’s an original thought in this book, aside from the unorthodoxy of using stick figures to convey a point, I didn’t see it.

Make your goals specific. Shun negativity. Set realistic expectations. Don’t compare yourself to others. Nothing good comes easy (sic). The journey of 1000 miles begins with a first step. Discipline turns (conscious) activities into habits. Willpower is directly connected to mind control. There are no shortcuts. Beating your kids for the fun of it can be cathartic.

Those are all actual quotes from the book, followed by one that would have made The Skinny On Willpower semi-interesting had Randel chosen to use it.

Randel does introduce one concept, kind of – the difference between moderation and going cold turkey in changing behaviors. But he doesn’t argue for one over the other.

By frame 132 (Randel uses frames, two to a page, rather than pages), we get another one. It’s the first phrasing in the book that was unfamiliar: “ego depletion”. It means that once you commit to something difficult, it makes it hard to commit to much more than that. Don’t quit cigarettes and heroin at the same time, I guess. This book, like other titles in the series, is so monotonous and so simplistic that it forces a writer to search for adjectives. “Puerile” is the one that fits best so far.

This is the kind of book that a well-meaning but clueless parent will buy for a kid going off to college. If you’re a well-meaning but clueless parent, a caveat: the kid will never read it.

Filed Under: Bad Examples Tagged With: , , , ,

Months later, this book is still garbage I

May 6, 2011

Oh yes, there will be a Months later, this book is still garbage II. And III.

It’s Recycle Friday at Control Your Cash, in which we post a classic that another blog already posted months ago. This week that blog is the eclectic Financial Highway, and the post is a review of one of the worst personal finance books ever written. The guy who runs Financial Highway asked us to review it, and we did. Oh God, did we review it. And probably would have made its author cry, if he weren’t a lawyer and didn’t have tear ducts.

Yes, Trent at The Simple Dollar loved the book. Which tells you as much about its worth as our review did. Does. Will do. Here, read it. Our review, that is. Not the book:

When I consented to review The Skinny on Real Estate Investing, I assumed I’d be reviewing a book, and not a pamphlet illustrated by my 8-year old niece who drools a lot and still has some trouble negotiating bathroom time. This review might run longer than the book itself.

Jim Randel’s series of illustrated The Skinny on titles boasts that it’s “For Really Busy People!” It’s also suitable For Really Fidgety People who can’t get through a book longer than 10,000 words. The lengthiest passage is the introduction, which runs a full page and explains The Skinny on’s M.O. of culling swaths of information into a workable whole. But it doesn’t explain the distracting primary illustrations that adorn every page.

The jacket quotes all attest to Randel’s success as an investor, but none of them speak about the book itself.

Randel is an attorney, with condescension in his blood. He’s in love with his own (lame) sense of humor, and uses an asterisk in one panel with the footnote, “*Did you catch the metaphor?” No, I didn’t. Please explain it to me again, Attorney Boy, using something less complex than kindergarten sentences. Randel also has an amateur’s pedantic insistence on avoiding contractions, the bane of the self-important, self-published, self-righteous author. This makes for a book that is simultaneously juvenile and stilted. Maybe Randel avoids apostrophes because he can’t punctuate – he uses “+/-25%” where “~25%” should go, which makes a huge difference when calculating home values.

It’s barely possible to repeat yourself in a book this short, but he does. Did you know Randel was born in Perkins, Ohio? If you didn’t, don’t worry. He’ll tell you again. Several times.

He even puts a commercial for one of his other books right in the middle of the narrative.

The Skinny on Real Estate Investing is effectively a black-and-white comic book. It concerns a married stick-figure couple, ready to leave their workaday stick-figure lives and invest their way to stick-figure affluence. The husband gets suckered into attending a huckster’s “wealth-building” seminar – you know, because men are impulsive and scatterbrained while women are sensible and rational – when Randel himself jumps into the couple’s lives (literally, out of a plane) to right the ship.

Because he’s a lawyer, or perhaps because he never learned to write for someone other than himself, Randel shifts directly from first gear to lecturing overdrive. He starts this at the book’s quarter-mark (not coincidentally, when I first contemplated throwing The Skinny on Real Estate Investing in the swimming pool.) In the space of one panel, he goes from childish humor to the first edible meat of the book; this uninspired paragraph:

The key to all real estate investing is understanding what is called a cash-flow analysis. The logic of this analysis is the same whether you are buying a single-family house or a huge shopping center. The larger the property, the more numbers you need to review, but the methodology is the same.

The Drake Passage thinks The Skinny on Real Estate Investing is choppy. In another gem, Randel tells us that he’d only invest in a house if it “had an especially high likelihood for substantial appreciation.”

You mean, if its price was almost certain to rise a lot? Speak English. This book is short, but it’s anything but concise.

Randel explains legitimately important concepts like return on investment, leverage, cap rate and cash flow, but buries them in a style that no sane person will wallow through.

Adding value simply means finding ways to increase the value of your property

 

A square foot is a square that measures one foot by one foot

God, make it stop.

Randel moves effortlessly from simplistic to over the reader’s head. For instance, he drops a reference to Class A vs. Class B office space halfway through the book, but never bothers explaining it.* He adds that if you want to buy a property and you’re illiquid, you should ask the current owner to “take back a second mortgage”, again without explanation.

Even the layout is garbage. In some illustrated panels, the publisher uses a font visible only to prairie falcons. Sure enough, the content therein is some of the most valuable in the book.

(Randel uses a metaphor to explain how simple the math involved in real estate investing is: “it’s not ______!”

Guess what goes in the blank? No, not “rocket science”. The other one. But don’t fret: if you miss it on page 109, you can catch it again on page 156.)

I’m not sure which is more galling: Randel announcing that The Skinny on Real Estate Investing is just the first in a series; or him charging $14 for a book that clearly took him an afternoon to write, possibly a drunken one.

I got Randel’s insufferable little vanity project down to 41 words while losing no detail. Here’s every usable piece of knowledge in this book, in handy point form:

  • unlike with stocks and bonds, with real estate you can influence the return on your investment;
  • asking prices often mean nothing;
  • find partners, but keep a management fee for yourself;
  • don’t invest in real estate that doesn’t offer >10% cash-on-cash return.

What’s cash-on-cash return? Sorry, that’s a topic for another book.

_________________________________________

* There are 3 classes: A, B, and you can probably figure out the third. A Class “A” office building is at least 120,000 square feet. The term can even refer to multiple adjacent detached buildings that share an owner. A building this big should have a full-time property manager, maintenance person, and steward. There’s more to the definition than size, though — and almost all of it is subjective. A Class “A” building should be in a “good” neighborhood and have other amenities like covered parking and some sort of concentration on aesthetics. Class “A” means cachet for its tenants. A Class “A” building has at least 3 floors and can cost more than $200/square foot to build.

Class “C” is the bottom end of the market — for example, converted houses in old parts of town. Which means Class “B” is everything else — functional, decent buildings that were built for the express purpose of accommodating businesses, but aren’t places you would stick your chest out and brag about renting at.

Filed Under: Bad Examples Tagged With: , , ,