Review: Quit Like a Millionaire: No Gimmicks, Luck, or Trust Fund Required

Quit Like a Millionaire: No Gimmicks, Luck, or Trust Fund Required by Kristy Shen
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Another in the recent crop of books on young people saving enough money to reach financial independence and retire early. I’ve read quite a few of these books, and many, if not most, tend to the how-to, with some personal details of the journey to provide insight into the unique ways that the author pulled off their financial feat. This was very similar to most of the others, with some distinct differences that really set it apart. First, the author begins her story in her youth, as a very poor child in China. She relates tales of her family and her upbringing, which started with need and hunger. She uses these anecdotes, at times shocking, to help explain her “scarcity mindset”, which is what she attributes much of her ability to save prodigious amounts of money. Note the author is married, and her husband did not seem to have this mindset, but still worked with the author to save over half their pay for many years. The author then described the steps in her financial development, figuring out the ability to become financially independent over time and through a few leaps of thought. This reads like a book by a researcher explaining where they got their ideas. I found this very interesting and similar to my own lines of thought. Shen then describes the issues she has dealt with and what she has learned along the way, with topics such as budgets, financial benefits of travel, tax avoidance, buckets for planning, insurance, and more. I found the idea of buckets well described. Shen is good at coming up with names for some of the strategies she followed, such as her cash cushion and yield shield. Nicely done. And while she provides mostly generic budget information or samples in the body of the book, she saves a few appendices for her actual budget and savings numbers. Quite interesting. The writing has attitude I have come to expect from the millennial generation, where cursing is second nature. I found the attitude unnecessary and a bit overwhelming from the story.

As for the advice, it seems mostly reasonable. Shen is Canadian, so provides both American and Canadian examples throughout. As I compare her situation to mine, I see that her advice really revolves around not owning real estate, trusting medical insurance will always be there (Canadians, nuf said), having a mindset to massively save from large engineering salaries, and not having kids (although her chapter on kids say retiring early is done with kids all the time, they don’t have them). Most interesting advice -- foreign travel to lower costs. I’ve heard this before, but Shen’s descriptions were compelling.

Note that the author is a computer engineer with a head for math, which she talks about quite a few times throughout the book. I found one of the few math equations in the book, on page 179 of the paperback, had a set of parentheses missing, leaving the equation incorrect. While she might have gotten her math order of operations out of whack, Shen seems to have her financial operations in order..


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