My Favourite Takeaways – Millionaire Teacher and FREE book giveaway

My Favourite Takeaways – Millionaire Teacher and FREE book giveaway

When I first heard about Millionaire Teacher, I was excited to get my hands on it.  Now that I have, I couldn’t imagine not owning this gem of a book in my personal finance library.

Want your own copy of Millionaire Teacher by Andrew Hallam?  Read on!

Millionaire Teacher doesn’t preach nor beg you to change your ways.  It lays out nine simple rules, rules about wealth you should have learned in school.

Two main themes run through Millionaire Teacher.  The first, most of us lack financial literacy.  It’s not our fault, our educational system and our financial system are flawed and have been working against us for decades.  The second theme, money has been a taboo subject for way too long; the subject of money is undeniably essential yet few of us want to talk about it, learn about it or understand it.  This is far from ideal.

“Did your parents share how long it took them to pay off their house, and what factors affected this?”

“Did they explain how credit cards worked, and where and how they invested their money?”

For most of us, the answers are “no” and “no”.  As Andrew Hallam writes:

“Without a sound financial education, students can graduate from top universities with starry academic titles, but with little more financial knowledge than an eighth grader.”

Instead, we should take charge and get control over our financial lives.  Why?  Poor financial management causes too many people to fall into bad habits, weak investments and bad credit.  Instead of your money working hard for you, you’re working hard for the money.  Besides folks, nobody cares more about your money more than you do, except maybe Andrew Hallam!

Before Millionaire Teacher was launched, I followed Andrew Hallam’s blog for a few years now from Singapore.  His blog is outstanding.

Andrew is a Canadian, who lives in Singapore and teaches high school english there at an American School.  Andrew didn’t grow up rich or even wealthy on Canada’s west coast.  His dad was a mechanic.  His mom worked part-time at a retail store.  In his teens he learned the value of money and learned it wasn’t a necessity to have a high paying job in order to build wealth.  Before Andrew’s 20^th birthday, he started to invest and he hasn’t stopped since.  The vital lessons Andrew has learned over the last two decades, the rules of wealth creation that were never taught in his school, have allowed him to become a multi-millionaire on a teacher’s salary.

The way I see it, if Andrew Hallam can do it, so can we.

Millionaire Teacher is full of charm.  Andrew tells stories, mostly his own but includes others who have applied his nine rules and are much wealthier for it.  It’s a clever book.  It’s a funny book.  The book doesn’t overwhelm you with facts and figures but it does provide some meaningful statistics that reinforce why his nine rules are so important for us to apply.  His book is a history lesson in the markets without being dull or boring.   Andrew is an educator.  This book is written for you, not at you:

“I needed a different vehicle to extend my teaching, so I created this book with help from more than 100 of my friends and colleagues.  Continuing to hold free financial seminars, I probably did more questioning that lecturing to find out what the average university-educated person understood about money so I could teach to the broadest possible audience… The result is this book:  written by a millionaire teacher who listened closely to his students.”

(from Introduction section)

Millionaire Teacher is your guide to understanding the wealthy, how they think, how they act.   The wealthy don’t drive the best cars nor covet material goods. Rather, they follow a basic recipe of living “within your means”, saving and investing wisely for tomorrow.  I have read few books that distill the path to wealth creation as simple, straight-forward and as witty as Andrew Hallam has.

I encourage everyone to get their copy of this book like I did, so you can avoid being schooled by the financial industry and others who want your money.  Better still friends, stay tuned to my blog because I’m going to be giving away a free copy of Millionaire Teacher to one lucky reader!

In my next post, Part 2 of my Favourite Takeaways – Millionaire Teacher, I’m going to provide you with an overview of his nine rules of wealth creation and some great excerpts from Andrew’s shining book.

Do you have a copy of Millionaire Teacher?

If not, do you want a free copy? 🙂

With this blogpost and the next two that will rave about Millionaire Teacher, I’m going to tally up comments and tweets to randomly select one lucky reader or tweeter to send them a FREE copy of Andrew Hallam’s book just in time for Christmas!

There are a few ways to enter:

• 1 entry point: Leave a comment on this post telling me what you liked about this book or why you want it.
• 1 entry point: Retweet this post. If you do, you must include “@myownadvisor” in the tweet so I can find it or you must add the tweet timestamp in the comments below.   
• 1 entry point: Link to this post from your site, to your readers.  Again, please let me know about this link in the comments below so I can add your point.

Entries will be accepted until midnight December 11, 2011.  From a long list of entries I’ll use Random.org to choose our lucky winner!  Good luck!

Stay tuned to my blog for Part 2 later this week!