Book review: Yes, you can get a financial life!

With their latest book Yes, You Can Get a Financial Life!, the team of Ben Stein and Phil Demuth has written its best, and most important, book yet.

Using an innovative financial planning software called ESPlaner (available online for $149) and data from multiple sources about the financial life of the average Americans, they have plotted a life cycle personal finance strategy that can lead any reasonably intelligent reader to a life of relative financial ease. The focus is on keeping consumption as constant and high as possible, and then varying savings over the course of the life cycle to achieve an amount necessary to maintain the same standard of living in retirement.

With chapters like "Saving and investing in your 20's" and "Single 30s", the authors discuss the financial issues that people are likely to go through at various stages, and provide a no-nonsense plan for financial success.

In addition to an extremely useful personal finance book, we also get some musings on business, politics, and life from Ben Stein, one of the great minds of our time. Writing about college for instance, he says that "There are no competence-based standards for graduation that would offer future employers any reason to take college diplomas seriously, although they still do."

Some of the advice is also off-beat, and very different from what many personal finance books would offer: Send your kids to private school if you can, but don't help them pay for college.

This is definitely well worth the price and makes a terrific, and more serious, companion to Stein's also excellent How to Ruin Your Life series.