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I recently finished reading another book from the Seattle Public Library titled “What No One Ever Tells You About Investing in Real Estate” by Robert J Hill. As someone who would very much like to invest in real estate some day, I felt that this would be an interesting read. For the most part is was an interesting read. I would call it entertaining and informative.

This book, written by Robert J Hill, Esq, tells about many different real life situations that have happened to real life real estate investors. Some are horror stories that would make you never want to consider purchasing a home. Others give you a real life example of why you might want to purchase title insurance or any other product along those lines. Robert also threw enough real estate successes in there to convince you that maybe real estate investing could be the thing for you.

In this book , the author uses “real-life advice from 101 successful investors” to tell 112 different stories of things that they have had go right or wrong. Many of these stories came as submissions from his website realestatestories.com. Essentially, the author summarized the stories that the investors had given him, and then added his own personal comments and commentary. This made this book a very easy read. Because of the way the book is laid out with all the different stories, it makes it so that one can easily just pick it up and start reading right away without any need to refresh their memory.

Overall I really enjoyed this book. It was something that I could easily just pick up at any time and start reading. The author also put many major examples that clearly show that real estate investing can have some major pitfalls and is not all fun and games. I would highly recommend this book to someone who is thinking about getting into real estate investing, but doesn’t have the time to read a giant instruction manual. I feel my time was well spent reading this book.

I figured that since I have been living in Seattle long enough it was about time that I got a membership through the Seattle Public Library. Seattle recently built a brand new library for downtown. From the outside it has this totally random shape made out of steel and glass. It really is more of a work of art than an actual building. Inside there are 9-10 different levels. The first 5 levels have a lot of seating and computer areas, as well as a lot of fiction novels. The remaining floors are the non-fiction. These floors spiral on an incline around the northern half of the building. It is a pretty clever idea, but the library can be a bit confusing to navigate. The following picture is what the Seattle Public Library looks like. You can find a nice little review of the library, as well as some other cool pictures here.

Anyway, I set up my account during my lunch break and set out to explore the library. I decided to go check out the books they had in the business/investing section. Those are in the 330’s in the dewey decimal system for those keeping track at home. Originally I wanted to join the library because I didn’t feel like paying $27 + tax for the Turtletrader book at Barnes and Noble. Unfortunately it is already checked out, but I am next in line for it.

It took me awhile to find the right section. I knew that I wanted to be in the 330’s, because it seemed like every other finance book started with 33x as well. I naturally assumed that the 3xx section would be on the third floor. Turns out I was wrong, and the third floor just had fiction books. I found a map that showed that the section that I needed to be in was actually on the 7th floor.

Once I finally found my section, I realized that I needed to find something fairly quickly if I were to be able to check it out and get back to work with enough time to eat some lunch as well. The library actually has a pretty decent selection of finance titles, and after a bit of searching I came along a couple that looked like winners.

The first book is called The EDGAR Online Guide to Decoding Financial Statements: Tips, Tools, and Techniques for Becoming a Savvy Investor. The book was written in 2004 by Tom Taulli, an EDGAR Online analyst. The book looks like it shows how to decipher the typical financial statement that is on the EDGAR website and how to make the most of it. For those of you who don’t know, EDGAR Online is a website run by the SEC which lists all of the financial releases of publicly traded companies.

The second book that I checked out is called How Technical Analysis Works by Bruce M. Kamich. After flipping through this book, it looks like it gives a nice overview of many of the different chart reading techniques. This should be an interesting read.

I have to return these books by March 24th, so hopefully that will give me enough time to take a decent look through them and possibly write a little review about each of them.

I was at Barnes and Noble earlier today when I came across a “new” book written by Suze Orman. Now when I say that the book is new, I mean that it is new to me. The book has actually been out since March of 2005, so it is actually about three years old. Nevertheless, the information that is inside does not really change from year to year. For those of us who do not know who Suze Orman is, she writes articles for Yahoo! Finance and also has her own show on CNBC called the Suze Orman Show. Her specialty is personal finance.The book that I found was called The Money Book for the Young, Fabulous & Broke. The book is geared towards the younger generation who is in their twenties up until their early thirties. It is most directed to those who have accumulated a pile of debt going through college, and now that they are out they are struggling to make ends meet with a low paying job, high cost of living and endless debt. Even if you aren’t hopelessly in debt, a younger person can find this book to be especially beneficial. In this book, Suze covers a variety of topics over the course of 10 chapters and 360 pages.

Here is a summary of the table of contents:

1. Know the score (Credit scores)
2. Career moves
3. Give yourself credit (Get the most out of credit cards)
4. Making the grade on student debt
5. Save up
6. Retirement rules
7. Investing made easy
8. Big ticket purchase: Car
9. Big ticket purchase: Home
10. Love and money

The thing that I really liked about this book when I was browsing through it was how simple the author makes things seem. Suze puts all her points into really simple terms that people can relate to and understand, even if they have never taken a finance class before. If you or someone you know is going through a financial rough patch, this could be really helpful to get them to understand where the best places would be to put their money. Currently you can buy this book for only $6.25 at Abebooks.com