Financial Cheat Codes
How to Win the Game of Finance
Financial Cheat Codes is an unorthodox self-help book about healthy personal finance strategies.
Sean Dempsey’s direct financial self-help book Financial Cheat Codes is about amassing personal wealth.
Forwarding advice for attaining financial freedom and generational wealth, the book suggests counterintuitive ways to make strategic investments, build passive income, and minimize risk. It is organized as a reference text, with its content divided by subject. Its topics include paying oneself first and identifying great deals, with advice given on the crucial steps of each process. Indeed, it does an able job of distilling complex financial concepts into comprehensible terms.
Its design inspired by classic video games, the book includes frequent illustrations of pots of gold, calculators, and piggy banks; its page numbers are also pixelated. These habits are sometimes distracting, as is its use of bold text for emphasis. More visually effective are its subheadings, lists, and illustrative graphics.
It also seeks to distinguish itself with active prose, as with injunctions to be “un-normal,” to avoid being “over-risked,” and to be cautious about “gambling in the Wall Street casino.” Its dramatic flair, as when it compares market volatility to living in Pompeii, is memorable, though its tendency toward hyperbole, as when it references banks kicking themselves for lending money at insanely low rates, is distracting. Its analogies are also sometimes overblown, as where it suggests paying one’s mortgage off early and makes a comparison to other decisions being like eating cereal at a buffet. Its use of humor is also indulgent, as where it suggests translating the word “equities” to “turds” in one’s head as an avoidance tactic. Its digressions also impede it, as does its emphatic editorializing on subjects like income taxes and banking that are ill-connected to clear financial advice.
Further, the book too often strikes a contrarian position, undermining its persuasiveness. For instance, it challenges popular guidance on debt, casting itself in counterposition to “what normal people think and do.” Its defiance of conventional wisdom on subjects like attending college, working a nine-to-five, and investing in stocks is undersupported. Indeed, more focus is given to strategies like investing in real estate, vesting in whole life insurance, getting out of bad debt, leveraging good debt, and minimizing one’s tax burden; on such subjects, it supports its claims with clear numbers, as where it breaks down a monthly budget item by item to suggest good investment strategies.
A flashy financial self-help book, Financial Cheat Codes includes strategies for saving, investing, managing debt, and growing one’s net worth.
Reviewed by
Joseph S. Pete
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book and paid a small fee to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Foreword Reviews and Clarion Reviews make no guarantee that the publisher will receive a positive review. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
