I grabbed The Automatic Millionaire : A Powerful One-Step Plan to Live and Finish Rich in the Charlotte airport on the way home, and was done by the time my plane hit Dallas. I've read other books by Bach before, but found this one to suit me better. As some of the comments on Amazon say, the ideas Bach is presenting aren't fundamentally new or radical. In fact, they're the same things you'll find in Rich Dad, Poor Dad or any one of ten other personal finance books. The two things that make this book different are Bach's writing style, and the way he makes applying his ideas so simple.

The writing style was extremely effective for me. It's not fancy, it's not complicated, it just gets the point across. In the fine tradition of personal finance books, Bach starts out with some real examples of people applying the ideas. He uses people who didn't want to put ads in newspapers, didn't want to quit their jobs, and didn't want to start their own businesses, but did want to be able to retire early. That resonates pretty well with me.

From examples, Bach gets into very specific ideas (which, like I said, have been covered in lots of other books) about how to save for retirement. The big point is to "Pay Yourself First", making sure to take a slice out of your paycheck before the government does (as with a 401k account), to make sure you're saving in the most effective way possible. After that, he talks about how much you should save for a given target at retirement.

But the main point he's trying to get across is that nobody does these things if it's not easy. It's one thing to say you're going to save $1000 each year, it's another thing to have to remember to write the checks. So Bach's main point is that if you can't set your saving up to be completely automatic, you'll never do it. So he walks through a number of ways to automate your saving and investing, with some very concrete examples of places to go for help.

The whole book only takes three or four hours to read, and if you've never read a personal finance book, I highly recommend it. As someone who reads a lot of books like this, I loved it. The style is effective, the points are good, and his plan for making things concrete are extremely realistic.