Personal blog on early retirement, selling tradelines, and analytics projects. I write about what I learn as I am learning it.
There’s a certain type of personal finance book that makes you want to close it halfway through and go simplify your portfolio immediately. “A Wealth of Common Sense” by Ben Carlson is one of those books. It doesn’t try to teach you a complicated system or sell you on a strategy you’ve never heard of. The entire argument is: you’re probably doing too much, the complexity isn’t helping, and here’s why simplicity tends to win.
I picked up Credit Secrets by Scott and Allison Hilton a while back, curious whether the advice overlapped with or contradicted what I’d learned from years of actually selling tradelines. Short version: it’s a solid book for someone starting from zero knowledge about how credit repair works, with one meaningful caveat I’ll get to.
I’ve read The Slight Edge twice, which tells you something. Most self-help books I finish once, appreciate in the moment, and forget by the following month. Jeff Olson’s central idea stuck around in a way that most don’t, and I think it’s because the framework is simple enough to actually use day-to-day rather than just appreciate as an idea.
“Set for Life” by Scott Trench is one of those books that’s more useful in your late twenties than your late thirties, which isn’t a knock — it’s just the honest audience. Trench built his framework from his own experience going from broke recent grad to financially independent relatively quickly, and the whole book is oriented around aggressive early-stage wealth-building. If you’re past that stage, you’ll still find useful ideas, but the action items are most relevant when you’re starting from zero.
Here’s something most people don’t realize when they pick up “The Way to Wealth”: it’s not really a book. It’s a short essay Benjamin Franklin wrote in 1758 as a preface to the final edition of Poor Richard’s Almanack. The whole thing takes maybe 30 minutes to read. What you’re getting on Amazon is usually a very slim volume — the essay itself, possibly with some historical notes. That’s it. Which means if someone tells you “this book changed my life,” what actually happened is that a 30-minute read from 1758 changed their life. That’s either impressive or concerning depending on how you look at it.
