Finance and Investing Book Club

During this meetup, we will discuss The Next Millionaire Next Door: Enduring Strategies for Building Wealth by Thomas J. Stanley and Sarah Stanley Fallaw.

"Over the past 40 years, Tom Stanley and his daughter Sarah Stanley Fallaw have been involved in research examining how self-made, economically successful Americans became that way. Despite the publication of The Millionaire Next Door, The Millionaire Mind, and others, myths about wealth in American still abound. Government officials, journalists, and many American still tend to
confuse income with wealth. A new generation of household financial managers are hearing from so-called experts in personal financial management due to the proliferation of the cottage industry of financial blogs, podcasts, and the like. In many cases, these outlets are simply experiences shared without science, case studies without data based on broader populations. Therefore, the authors decided to take another look at millionaires in the United States to examine what changes could be seen 20 years after the original publication of The Millionaire Next Door. In this book the authors highlight how specific decisions, behaviors, and characteristics align with the discipline of wealth building, covering areas such as consumption, budgeting, careers, investing, and financial management in general. They include results from quantitative studies of wealth as well as case studies of individuals who have been successful in building wealth. They discuss general paths to building wealth on your own, focusing specifically on careers and lifestyles associated with each path, and what it takes to be successful in each."

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Some more general notes about the book club:

• We rotate through different types of books, with some covering historical or current events and others more along the lines of practical advice about how to do something.
• No specific ideas are necessarily endorsed – we try to read a variety of topics to expose ourselves to new ideas and ways of thinking.
• We try to grab the room to the back-right of Fortnight Brewing Company's main inside seating area (coming in the door on the front of the building, facing Maynard Road), but will get a table nearby if the room isn't available.
• No worries about coming in mid-discussion ― we usually manage to get off-topic anyways ― and feel free to come even if you didn't manage to finish the book. Also, no shame if you listen to it on Audible!

During this meetup, we will discuss Chapters 1-7 of Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber (specifically, the "Updated and Expanded" release). The later chapters will be covered in the following meeting since the book is plenty large enough to split across two events.

"Before there was money, there was debt. For more than 5,000 years, since the beginnings of the first agrarian empires, humans have used elaborate credit systems to buy and sell goods—that is, long before the invention of coins or cash. It is in this era that we also first encounter a society divided into debtors and creditors—which lives on in full force to this day.

So says anthropologist David Graeber in a stunning reversal of conventional wisdom. He shows that arguments about debt and debt forgiveness have been at the center of political debates from Renaissance Italy to Imperial China, as well as sparking innumerable insurrections. He also brilliantly demonstrates that the language of the ancient works of law and religion (words like “guilt,” “sin,” and “redemption”) derive in large part from ancient debates about debt, and shape even our most basic ideas of right and wrong.
We are still fighting these battles today."

***

Some more general notes about the book club:

• We rotate through different types of books, with some covering historical or current events and others more along the lines of practical advice about how to do something.
• No specific ideas are necessarily endorsed – we try to read a variety of topics to expose ourselves to new ideas and ways of thinking.
• We try to grab the room to the back-right of Fortnight Brewing Company's main inside seating area (coming in the door on the front of the building, facing Maynard Road), but will get a table nearby if the room isn't available.
• No worries about coming in mid-discussion ― we usually manage to get off-topic anyways ― and feel free to come even if you didn't manage to finish the book. Also, no shame if you listen to it on Audible!

During this meetup, we will discuss Chapters 8-12 of Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber (specifically, the "Updated and Expanded" release).

"Before there was money, there was debt. For more than 5,000 years, since the beginnings of the first agrarian empires, humans have used elaborate credit systems to buy and sell goods—that is, long before the invention of coins or cash. It is in this era that we also first encounter a society divided into debtors and creditors—which lives on in full force to this day.

So says anthropologist David Graeber in a stunning reversal of conventional wisdom. He shows that arguments about debt and debt forgiveness have been at the center of political debates from Renaissance Italy to Imperial China, as well as sparking innumerable insurrections. He also brilliantly demonstrates that the language of the ancient works of law and religion (words like “guilt,” “sin,” and “redemption”) derive in large part from ancient debates about debt, and shape even our most basic ideas of right and wrong.
We are still fighting these battles today."

***

Some more general notes about the book club:

• We rotate through different types of books, with some covering historical or current events and others more along the lines of practical advice about how to do something.
• No specific ideas are necessarily endorsed – we try to read a variety of topics to expose ourselves to new ideas and ways of thinking.
• We try to grab the room to the back-right of Fortnight Brewing Company's main inside seating area (coming in the door on the front of the building, facing Maynard Road), but will get a table nearby if the room isn't available.
• No worries about coming in mid-discussion ― we usually manage to get off-topic anyways ― and feel free to come even if you didn't manage to finish the book. Also, no shame if you listen to it on Audible!