The thin green line The money secrets of the super wealthy

This book's message can be summed up in the title of its epilogue: "It's Better to Be Wealthy than Rich, Even If You're Poor." The titular green line is the author's useful conceit for describing this desirable state of being. A financial journalist, Sullivan consults with experts from the "one percent" to prescribe a set of strategies for achieving financial stability, such as investing in education for one's children rather than spending time and energy on avoiding taxes. Most important, in his opinion, is understanding how your feelings about earning, saving, and spending motivate financial decisions. Sullivan lays bare a number of his own financial concerns, foibles, and successes. His personal journey, which includes being grilled by the TIGER 21 club (a kind of therapy group for the financial elite) and a visit to Kansas State University's behavioral finance research lab, proves both entertaining and instructive. Drawing on research in behavioral economics, the book is timely-taking up the topic of income inequality without picking a side-as well as smart. Agent: Erika Storella, Gernert Company. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Want to get rich? Stay in school and save your money.New York Times financial columnist Sullivan (Clutch: Why Some People Excel Under Pressure and Other Don't, 2010) has a deeper, more sophisticated take on money management than all that, but the point remains: Most wealthy people place a premium on education, have voted on that with their wallets, and have learned the fine art of deferring gratification with an eye to building a portfolio. Writing sometimes too breezily but always engagingly, Sullivan distinguishes between "rich," meaning simply having a lot of money, and "wealthy," meaning "having more money than you needed to do all the things you wanted to do." That distinctionthe thin green line of the titleis important, since it gauges financial well-being on one's tastes and requirements. In that sense, a person without encumbrances who has $100,000 can be wealthier than one leveraged to the hilt and worth 10 times that on paper. So being rich does not translate to being financially secure. Nor does it necessarily mean having successfully captured huge swaths of the market; by Sullivan's account, the top 1 percent of earners in this country had "just about the same percentage they had in 1936." Of course, since that time, the 1 percent has become adept at rent-seeking. All the same, they distinguish themselves in other ways, including spending less money eating out and putting more into retirement accounts. "Over years," Sullivan notes, "those differences become enormous." Other subtle differences come into play, as well. There's a reason employers are reluctant to hire workers with GEDs, for instance, and why being rich doesn't always equate to having good taste. Still, as one of Sullivan's chapter titles puts it by way of summary and slogan, "It's better to be wealthy than rich, even if you're poor." Therein lies the secret to security. There's good how-to stuff here, but Sullivan's added value is his gentle insistence that wealth and money aren't synonyms. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.