Book Review: The Simple Path to Wealth

The Simple Path to Wealth: Your road map to financial independence and a rich, free life by J.L. Collins

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The reason why this book so great is because 1) It is simple 2) It is prescriptive 3) and the author shows courage to take a stand on achieving financial independence through stock markets.

Most advices on subjects like career, marriage, health are extremely vague and author rarely risks herself to provide any tailored advise. JL Collins is different. He is very opinionated, doesn’t mind looking bad and cant get more prescriptive than this.

If you are living and working in the United States, this is a MUST read. It helps you to gain perspective and helps dive deeper into some of the internal workings of US financial system.

The book is more about achieving financial independence by keeping it dead simple and on auto pilot. If you are someone like me who works at one job and don’t want to fiddle with multiple income streams, this book is a gem. There are a few downsides for this book.

The book is extremely US centric and all the examples around IRA, 401K may not applicable to a non-US reader. Since it is very prescriptive, almost all the advices are elaborated using US financial instruments.

To fully appreciate this book, you should have indulged in some sort of wealth creation activities before such as stock picking, investing in properties or something else and burnt your fingers. It also assumes you are familiar with basic economics and wealth building options out there.

I would argue this is one of the best foundational investing books as it helps you to build the right mindset and also provides all the “real numbers and stats” to create your own plan.

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