Unfortunately this was archived before I could read which is a shame as it’s my niche and one I was really looking forward to getting into :-(

It starts with a bang with foreward by Robert Kiyosaki. Book focuses on bad habits that put people in tricky situations. It leads to loss of fortune that they have accumulated.
After Introduction and lots of biography author starts to dissesct reasons.
He uses stories of his known people to show where they went wrong. Like they spent too much, they believed their financial advisor and 10 similar reasons in all.
Book is simple. Things written are also simple. It is a shirt and pacy read. It is of practical value and recommended to know basic pitfalls that everyone should avoid.
But I thought it should have little less of biography.
Overall a good concise read.
Thanks netgalley and the baby for review copy.

The book is very good and the stories told are thought provoking. The life seems to be really the way the author described and it is better to get this point early enough. Great book overall with learning points and advice.

Ordinarily I like to support other financial professionals who've written books (as I have) to try to spread financial knowledge and literacy to everyone who needs it. However, the book was disappointing.

There are some very good points made in the book. The author warns against get-rich-quick schemes, and explains that wealth-building is not a quick process. He warns against DIY-ers and points out that top athletes know they don't know it all and hire coaches to help them with their games. I think that's a great analogy.

He shows how people can go through vast amounts of money, no matter how huge those sums may seem to the rest of us, through careless spending or not understanding what we're doing. One of the chapters discusses addiction and how it also drains resources, and that it can happen to anyone.

On the other hand...
I do not expect a good financial advisor to make false claims about Social Security. He claims it's going "bankrupt" as of 2034. In fact, that's the time when Social Security expects to be able to pay out only 75% of benefits. Is that an issue that needs to be rectified? Yes. Bankrupt? Hardly.

At the end of every chapter the reader is invited to leave the book and go to the website to fill out a worksheet related to the chapter. I thought that was a poor choice, since it takes the reader out of the book, but the third section of the book is actually shilling for his financial program instead of being informational. Now the choice makes sense.

I agree that stories are a great way to explore some of these concepts, of how people can make lots of money and wind up penniless. However, some of his stories were filled with what I felt to be inappropriate gossip, and he speculates about the motivations of a couple of wives (not any of the men) in a really nasty way that frankly offended me, and I don't easily take offense.

There is so much repetition in this book. The first section is basically one concept repeated over and over again, and it's quite irritating. (The book really needs an editor.) His system for why people make wrong decisions is based on an acronym, which he repeats twice in each chapter for no apparent reason. The beliefs he ascribes for each story don't always match up well with the story he tells.

One chapter deals with addiction, something he clearly has no knowledge about, and would have benefited greatly from actually asking someone in recovery or trained in recovery. He claims people get addicted because they feel "invincible". Which is not really why most people spiral into it, so the lesson he wants you to take from it doesn't really make sense.

He claims that the program he's selling is based on neurology, which is weird since he doesn't seem to know anything about it beyond the fact that the human brain relates well to stories. He says at one point that he doesn't know why kids and teens think they're invincible. Anyone who actually does know something about the human brain knows that's largely because the prefrontal cortex, which is in charge of executive function and governs things like thinking through consequences, doesn't fully mature until people are in their 20s. The brain, particularly the reward system, usually plays a part in addiction and this fact isn't mentioned at all.

I think there's a good idea here, which is to show how people who make a lot of money (the people in his stories aren't necessarily rich) can lose everything, due to bad choices or beliefs. The execution just didn't quite work.

I’m not really a self help reader usually, but this book caught my eye and it was out of nosiness that I tried it. It even admits in the book that there is “a curiosity, a sense of satisfaction or self preservation hearing stories about the rich losing everything has great appeal and power”.
However, this book uses these stories as a basis to learn from - you don’t have to be rich to learn from the principles of how to be more thoughtful and careful with what money you have and how to learn from the mistakes of others.
The book holds 10 short stories written as a proper little story, not just facts. Then in between each one the author explains why mistakes were made and how to try and make sure you don’t do the same.
It is a book written for an American audience, with all examples and settings being in America, however the principles remain the same.
Overall this book was interesting. It certainly made me stop and reflect on my own financial habits and did make a number of valid, interesting points - but an awful lot was simple common sense and stories of people quite frankly having NO sense when dealing with massive sums of money and not listening to professional advice made me rather unsympathetic to their plight and satisfied my curiosity very well.
I rated this 4⭐️ in the context of its genre (it certainly can’t compare to a great psychological thriller!) 😊

What's your story when it comes to money?
This book offers different insights on financial management- and I loved how the author incorporated stories to his experiences and how he highlighted the beliefs that fed our excuses, then influenced our actions and finally led to results. It's an interesting book and of the traps he shared here, it was quite eye opening to note that I have walked into three of them at some point in my life.
I would however advise that no reader should be fooled by the title- remember the question I asked at the beginning of this review? Yes, this story does not talk about billionaires or mention any of them as case studies, but rather it focuses on you and me- and if you have access to money and you think you are not rich...then that belief right there would make you miss out on some pretty good advice.
Thanks Netgalley for the eARC.

Thank you netgalley for providing this ARC in exchange for an honest review.
This is a decent financial advising book with lots of good insights on why people struggle financially. The author promises plenty of personal stories but they are vague and short of details. After awhile the book begins to feel repetitive. This isn't an insider on how the rich lose money but just a few annecdotes put together to make the book appear to be more interesting than it was.
Overall still worth reading the book but nothing illuminating.