Business Money Books

Gene's 2nd book is not nearly as interesting as his first one, Kiss and Make Up. While his previous book is more of an autobiography and history of his band, Sex Money Kiss focuses on his love of cash and hatred of marriage. There is nothing really new or exciting to be found here, just rehashing in more detail his opinions regarding women and money. This book is for the true Kiss die-hrad fan or Gene Simmons fanatics only.

Great book, by someone that loves money. It is a raw and honest point of view that no wonder has been useful for Gene Simmons. You may not like it and as a musical idol, may sound deceptive, but it is mostly true and although it may be some exaggerated, may still work for those of you who deep inside know that money is everything. It is not a business plan, but has some interesting ideas here and there that are surely useful if you are doing financially fine. I highly recommend it.

WOW !!! I am reborn again. This book is my bible. I have hundreds of books on audio and I listened most of them. One day I wanted to walk in the park for twenty minutes and listen something, so I loaded Sex Money Kiss on my MP3 Player. I was so into the book that I did not realize I have been walking for two hours. I came back home and closed myself in a room till I hear the rest of the book. This is something that I have been waiting to hear for a long time. I am not a believer, but now in Gene Simmons I trust. To be clear I am not influenced by Gene as a Kiss member, because I am not a Kiss fan. I have listened hundreds of books and usually I rate my books between 0 and 3 for future reference, but this book I will rate 10, so I can go back to it again. Very true book although no woman will confirm it. I would suggest readers to ignore all female ratings, since the book exposes truths that women will not want men to even think about. Gene is a true messenger of all men and he found a new follower to admire him. Thank you for your honesty Gene and understand that you really created a masterpiece.

I didn't know much about Gene Simmons or Kiss. I found this book enlightening, entertaining, and worth reading. He gives sound financial advice, as well a look into his life, philosophies, and the business and history of KISS.

This was an entertaining insight into the life of Kiss frontman Gene Simmons. From his humble beginnings on coming to America to his rise to stardom and all the ideas and insights along the way. Definitely worth a read for both Kiss fans and anyone interested in how to make money and enjoy life to the fullest.

3 stars for its entertaining value, 2 stars for its real worth. The author seems to lack some understanding of macroeconomics, as mentioned in other reviews.

What made Wall Street Meat entertaining were the personal anecdotes regarding his contact with various well known personalities. This book starts in a similar vein, with stories about his efforts to raise money for his hedge fund. Then the book seems to completely lose its focus. It turns first into a high level history of the industrial revolution in England, and then into an economics lesson. The history is circumstantial and of questionable relevance. The economics is pure poorly thought out drivel. This stuff goes on for chapter after chapter. Had I written a review after the first few chapters, I would have given the book four stars. After finishing the book, I think I'm being generous giving it two stars.

It's entertaining, interesting, and well written. Not much investment strategies, but fun reading!

great informative book!

This book is a real letdown. As other reviewers noted, he wasn't running a typical hedge fund strategy. He just bought and held tech companies, either public or private. And he did this during the .com boom. He had the sense to wind down the fund before the crash. Gosh, he made a lot of money. As I think he himself says, never mistake talent for a Bull market.

You don't find out much of anything about his approach, because I don't think there was much too it.

The chapters jump around without much coherence. He seems to be building up to a point, leading to a big 11 page section that entirely in italics, in case you were going to miss it. We have higher margins than the developing world, so the trade deficit doesn't matter. That's it.

One of the least interesting books I've read this year.

At 35 and watching the world in financial crisis I decided to do something about my own financial budget. I needed help getting started and organized. I am just digging my way out of being in deep debt and I don't want to use credit cards any more. I want to be financially able to pay for stuff in cash by saving up for it. I went through high school and missed one very important thing and that was them teaching me life skills. I learned what I needed to to get into college but not how to budget my money. No more living from paycheck to paycheck. Thank you Cheryl Hosking for writing "Get to it! Organizational Solutions For Everyday Life... Budget Book." It has changed my financial future for the better. I recommend this book to everyone young and old to please buy this book and save your financial future. Get on track and you be in control of your money. Quit living from paycheck to paycheck and save for the fun things in life. God Bless.

At 38, I realized I had gone from my father handling my finances, to my husband handling them. I was too overwhelmed and scared to get any control for myself. Ms. Hosking's book helped make me comfortable with being in charge of my own finacial future. The "Get To It Budget Book" is easy to understand, and a great way to help you get ahead of debt. Thanks to it, I am thriving on a part time income! Highly recommended for anyone!

In terms of getting organized and taking control of your financial responsibilities, this is virtually certain to be the most important single book you will ever read. It will literally save you a fortune and zero out financial stress forever. The simple changes I have adopted because of this book have made a world of difference in my family finances.

I am not only making this my personal financial handbook, I am teaching my children Cheryl Hosking's system. She has done all the research and testing. You just have to adopt her system. It not only works like a charm, it is easy to stick with the program. The book includes the exact information, including the tracking forms I needed to get painlessly organized.

This book rates an A+++. It takes the pain out of a normally painful task. There is no fluff or hype here. The book is well designed, concise and eminently practical.

If you only buy one book this year, do yourself or someone you love a huge favor and make this the book. It's that good and it's that valuable.

Tirole has written an invaluable book that sheds light to a complex and extremley actual topic. By showing once again his seriousness as an economist (as opposed to others; i.e. Stiglitz), he goes back to first principles to understand the source of problems in international contracts. The application of modern corporate finance to international finance is extraordinary.
Even the first chapters should be obligatory reading to any student of international macro (even in the first macro course). The first one gives a concise history of modern currency crisis -the so called first twenty-first century crisis- while the second one masterfully summarizes the economists views on the subject.
Good economics, great topic, amazing timing.

While most economists are still puzzled by the most recent foreign exchange and banking crises - such as the ones that took place last year in Argentina and Uruguay - and some of them (like Stiglitz) are proposing reckless and innefective solutions, such as abolishing the IMF and most of the existing international agencies, Jean Tirole presents a more pensive and fruitful explanation of why these crises occur, and sheds new light towards a much more effective solution. His approach is based on a new field of agency theory called Corporate Finance, which deals with the set of institutions that make it credible for the suppliers of funds to recover their investments in an specific firm.

Tirole applies the basic principles of the prudential regulation of banks, that he worked before in collaboration with Mathias Dewatripont (MIT Press, 1994, ISBN: 0262041464), and which contains much of what we have learned through the twentieth century about financial crises. According to this approach, both the international financial and monetary systems would work much better if we had international risk classifying agencies on the one hand, providing information to investors about the liquidity and solvency of debtor countries, and a lender of last resort on the other. The trouble with the IMF is that it tries to perform both functions.

However, what makes external borrowing more complicated than a typical financial arrangement is the presence of a third player, that is the borrower's government which has both the incentives and the means to affect the foreing investor's return by manipulating the exchange rate or the capital mobility. Because the investors' return is affected by the behaviour of two agents, the borrower himself and its government, Tirole calls this a dual agency problem.

Tirole proposes an institutional reform in which the IMF should redefine its original mission, by concentrating in the role of facilitating the country's favourable access to foreign borrowing. This role underlies the (controversial) task of pre-qualification and conditionality. The IMF should also redefine its internal structure if it wants to perform well this new role. Its Board of Governors is too big and too heterogeneous to allow rapid and efficient decisions.

In summary, this book presents and original and groundbreaking approach to financial crises which, as we expected from the beginning, arises more questions than answers. However, we know that the only way to find the appropriate solution to a problem is by formulating the right questions, and this is exactly what Tirole does. I am convinced that if the international agencies follow this approach they will soon find the right way to prevent or to lessen international financial crises, in the same way as central banks and financial regulatory agencies did with domestic banking crises during the last century.

I was really disappointed by this book. I thought it would be about what happens to lottery winners after they win the money...including some statistics on who handles the situation well and who doesn't. I also expected stories about families who had won the lottery.

What I got was a story about a salesman (who is addicted to gambling) who offered lump sums of money to lottery winners...who were cash strapped living on their annuity payments from the lottery.

Fortunately, it sounds like most states will now convert annuity based winnings to lump sums for lottery winners, effectively eliminating the private lump sum buyout industry.

Unless you are interested in the adventures of a gambling addicted salesman taking advantage of people who didn't know how to handle a sudden increase in wealth, I would recommend skipping this book.

I am not a fan of lotteries, so I would suggest you invest your lottery ticket money instead of buying lottery tickets. If you are interesting in learning more about how to invest and increase your wealth slowly but surely, I would suggest reading some of the books noted below.

Index Mutual Funds: How to Simplify Your Financial Life and Beat the Pro's
The Richest Man in Babylon
Bogle on Mutual Funds: New Perspectives for the Intelligent Investor
The Millionaire Next Door
The Four Pillars of Investing: Lessons for Building a Winning Portfolio
A Random Walk Down Wall Street: The Time-Tested Strategy for Successful Investing, Ninth Edition
The Coffeehouse Investor: How to Build Wealth, Ignore Wall Street, and Get On With Your Life
The Bogleheads' Guide to Investing
Wealth: Grow It, Protect It, Spend It, and Share It
Retirement Income Redesigned: Master Plans for Distribution: An Adviser's Guide for Funding Boomers' Best Years

For someone who spent so long in a strange industry that buys out lottery winners, this author doesn't have many weird stories to tell. Most of this is about his office politics, which we don't really care about. He pads almost every paragraph with extraneous blather which reveals that he must be a world class motor-mouth in person. We already know that lotteries are won mainly by the poor and the blue collar. Everyone else sees them for what they are: taxes on the poverty stricken. I wish the writer had recounted more about the hard luck winners, and less about the brilliance of his boss, Ben, and the idiocies of Ben's replacement. You won't learn much from this book that you don't already know, which is disappointing.

You win the lottery and think you are an instant millionaire! THINK AGAIN!! Ugel has written a true story of his experience working for a company he is forbid to name, tracking down high end lottery winners who receive monthly payments instead of one lump sums. Your number comes up, you are excited, and then when you run to turn in your ticket, where you discover that the 3 million dollars will be taxed at 50 + %, then you will receive approximately 70,000 yearly for multiple years..... Doesn't exactly make you rich. Thats where the "firm" comes in. They will hound, harass, beg, borrow and even steal to gain the right to your monthly payment IN EXCHANGE for a huge amount of interest so they can graciously hand you over a larger lump sum.

Many paragraphs were repetive, and even boring. I suspect this is because he mentions early in the book that when he became employed with "the Firm," he had to sign a wavier stating he would never ever disclose any details of anything having to do with the Firm. Given the restrictions on his employment application, I feel Ugel did an excellent job of informing the public as much information as he was legally allowed to do. Basically, there are hundreds of firms who zero in on lottery winners (and now people who are awarded annunities from accidents payable over a certain time), and try to "buy"
their annual payments. In doing so, the person looses A LOT of money, but the company gets richer and richer.

Ugel spent time discussion his own battle with playing machine poker in the casinos, and his feelings of taking money from clients where he knew the deal would hurt them.

This book is NOT about how lottery winners spend money, but rather how people take advantage of these winners, and track them down at all costs.

Its definately a book worth reading. There are just enough actual stories of certain winners to keep the otherwise dull book sparkle.

I recommend it highly, especailly if you buy lottery tickets

Money for Nothing by Edward Ugel is a very interesting read. I particularly love books that detail the inner workings of jobs I not only know nothing about, but for which I didn't even know existed. Edward Ugel is a former salesman. But not just any old salesman. He sells lump sum payments to people who have won the lottery. You are probably thinking: doesn't the lottery just offer lump sum payments to its winners? Yes, in most states they do. But a big part of the reason they do is because of companies like the one Edward Ugel worked for. So there are many past winners who never had the option, many current winners who don't have that option, and some people who passed on the state-sponsered option at the time. So there are plenty of people to sell to.

The book is a fascinating story of what it takes to be a lump sum payment salesman. It is not told all that well (he is a salesman, rather than an author), but overall it kept me interested. You are welcome to read it, but since you probably won't, I will be happy to tell you about it (stop here if you plan to read it on your own).

Ed Ugel hated being a lump sum payment guy because of who he sold his products to. He sold to lottery winners. Especially, lottery winners that needed cash. I'm sure there are lottery winners that knew how to manage their money, but those folks didn't give folks like Ed Ugel the time of day. Rather, he dealt with people who squandered most of their "found money" rather quickly and needed a cash infusion. These people were generally not very intelligent and could be taken advantage of. However, that is not the main reason he didn't like it (although it was a part of it). Another part of is the gold rush mentality they had when they found a lottery winner - they would have to get their quick to make their sale or else someone else would take it. A very demanding job.

But the main reason he didn't like it was because that he saw himself and other salesmen taking on the characteristics of lottery winners. In a way, signing a deal with a lottery winner was like winning a little bit of the lottery yourself - it was generally a large infusion of money that you didn't really earn. So the salesmen generally spent the money as soon as they got it and were then desparate to make the next sale. They became lazy. Since most of their cold calls didn't result in any return and many of their big deals fell right in their lap, it didn't always make sense to work hard for the money. This laziness ultimately led to his downfall when a competitor is able to blow past his company and he is fired.

Ed Ugel also details the history of the lottery and the myth that the money all goes to education. As Ed is a gambler himself, he knows well the allure of easy money and how detrimental the lottery can be (watch for a future post regarding the lottery on my efficiency blog). Overall, it is a decent book, but one that I wouldn't recommend to everybody.

"Money for Nothing" is a superficial, less than credible account of a salesman's life selling "up front" money for lottery winners with multi-year payments. The book references winners' haste to settle (not even inquiring as to interest rates involved), misleading sales pitches that focus on what the winner needs (rather than deserves) to reduce the payout, sudden divorces made possible by the new wealth, etc.

However, few specifics are offered, especially on the financial terms involved. Instead, "Money for Nothing" provides lots of filler - eg. life prior to this job, getting this job, history of state lotteries, etc.

Bottom Line: Buying "Money for Nothing" would be paying money for nothing.

This book is a waste of money. Don't fall for it. This book is geared towards women who have no experience with money, which is why I suggest a Suze Orman book instead. This book was mostly filled with small advice from women who've gotten their finances in order. There are advice boxes on nearly every page, which means that most of the book is words from other people and NOT the author. The writing style was very slow, which made reading the book very slow. Overall, I'm upset I paid full price for it. I also suggest The Money Coach's Guide to Your First Million by Lynnette Khalfani. Her book is very easy to read. Filled to the brim with numbers and statistics that make you feel good about your chances of becoming a millionaire. One section showed how bad credit cost a man over $1 million dollars over his lifetime - while his friend saved $1 million by having good credit. Unbelievable but true. People with bad credit consistently overpay for the same items. Lynnette Khalfani's book is surprisingly a gem.

If passion had a picture it would be Marcia Brixey. Her gentle yet pin-point focus on freeing women from financial disaster through accessible empowering personal education at each well choreographed MoneyWi$eWomen seminar up and down the west coast has been the first step in financial awakening for thousands of women.

All too often women don't know what they don't know. It takes a compassionate woman like Marcia to help other women gently assume their own financial responsibility and accountability and reach their personal financial potential. With Marcia's book, "The Money Therapist" women across this great nation will have insights, experiences and instruction at their finger tips whereby they can attend to their financial house and build a stronger foundation for their financial future.

The book is crammed full of real live women's experiences and clear step-by-step how-to's and the correct actions to take. Start here with an investment in yourself with "The Money Therapist."

The Money Therapist is excellent reading for anyone interested in getting their financial house in order. The step by step information on getting out of credit card debt and safeguarding against identity theft are especially helpful. If you have nagging debt issues, this is the book for you.

Marcia Brixey has written an invaluable book for people who are ready to take control of their money. She teaches you how to get out of credit card debt, create a stable financial future, and use goal setting to live the life of your dreams. The best part about this book is its simplicity. Marcia is genuine; she connects with the reader and helps you achieve great financial success. Review by Sandra Smith, president of Aspire Seminars and
author of Get What You REALLY Want Without the Guilt.

This book is very well written, organized and easy to follow. A MUST read for anyone wanting to put their financial house in order.

I haven't received the book - and I have reported this to Amazon already and they have not replied

This is one of few books that I read cover to cover, and going to read it again in the next few months to remind myself and my business that there is more than just making money in life - its about making the world a better place to live for.

Although it doesn't contain any recipe for ice-creams (wasn't looking for one), it does contain the recipe for a successful business model built on a socially responsible organization that grew into a giant franchise all over the world - from a gas station and a mere 4 grands. GREAT role model for those going into business as well as those already in business.

Great resource annex at the back, from suppliers to other valued-led business. I live in Singapore, but if I have the chance, I will want to visit Vermont when my business takes off.

Since this book was a pre-Unilever take-over publication, it did not mention about the business model changes after that.

The world is getting messy - war, poverty, madness, scandals and terror, this book injects humanity into us, it gives me comfort when I go to sleep at night knowing that there are still hope and greatness in most of us. I give it 5 stars.