Books on Investing – The Modern Piggy Bank

Welcome To The Modern Piggy Bank

Welcome to The Modern Piggy Bank. Most likely you stumbled across us on your search to save more or make your money work for you. Either way, we’re happy you’re here.

The Modern Piggy Bank is a brand new website with the goal of cutting through all the nonsense that litters the internet of how to utilize your money to minimize your expenses and optimize your savings. You aren’t going to find where to get the best deals on $10 wine here or how to eat Bougie on a budget, what you’re going to find is solid research, tried and true techniques, and our own personal stories.

Most likely, we are just like you. We’re two really good friends that just graduated from Penn State and secured our full time jobs. Mike works in aerospace while I work at a startup. We live in two separate areas of the country now but during our four years in college we worked hard to put our dreams for a successful business into life.

We tried a lot of different ideas in college, a lot that never panned out but what mattered to us was that we were trying. We tried everything from delivering home cooked meals made by neighborhood “moms” to committing arbitrage on Amazon. What really drew us in was investing and that is where our passion lies. I did my internships at an asset management firm with $1.5 billion under management while Mike spent his time building planes and focusing on engineering. Yet we both knew we wanted to focus on investing. Fast forward a couple of years later and we secured our jobs and starting making real money.

We realized pretty quickly that with real money comes real expenses. And so The Modern Piggy Bank was born. The goal of this website is not to sell you some product that an advertiser wants to push. But to actually inform you of your choices as a retail banking client, a retail investor, and an average American who wants to make the most out of their money or as Mike and I constantly remind each other, the goal is to minimize expenses while optimizing savings.

“With real money comes real expenses”- Will Hershon

We love the challenge of investing and the rewards you can get from it and one day hope to have our own fund. But for now, we are working every day to save more, learn more, and invest wisely. I have goals to own real estate, mostly rental properties, and I’m going to document my experiences with that here. Mike wants to figure out better ETF and fund strategies that out perform the current indexes for lower costs.

We both really believe in the firm foundation theory of investing while Mike sometimes branches out in the more technical branches of algorithmic trading, considering his background in engineering, this isn’t surprising.

For now we’re both focusing on filling this website with the best information possible. I’ll be the first to admit we are going to make some mistakes, but we will also be the first people to fix them. We’re learning, just like you are. But we’re willing to share our successes and our mistakes. If we blow our budget on a night out we’re gonna write about how we fixed this in the future. When we buy our first rental property we’re going to write the process and what we looked for. Eventually we’re gonna have our portfolios up for you to see. Our views on investing, and the markets will be here as well.

The Modern Piggy Bank is going to focus on four major categories. Investing, Saving, Passive Income, and Education. Investing as you might have guessed is going to be focused on the markets and real estate. Saving is going to focus on the best ways to save money and the most efficient vehicles for doing so. Passive Income will take a little longer to build out as we believe that’s going to be focused more on maintaining the real estate portion of your portfolio, but I promise you, we will get there. And finally, Education. Education is where we will review and talk about the books we’re reading and the ideas we’re learning about, anything and everything helps when it comes to making smarter decisions with your money.

At The Modern Piggy Bank, we’re not going to give you some advice on how to save more from someone who heard it from someone’s brothers friends old roommate and how they managed to move out of their 500 square foot apartment and upgrade to a luxurious 700 square feet. We are going to give you our actual experiences right from our own lives of how we handle money, grow it, invest it, and save it. You’ll grow with us. No doubt, we will make mistakes at times. But we aren’t claiming to be perfect. We claim to be on a path few choose to actually follow yet all talk about.

Knowing what to do with your money is hard. I get it, and all of us at the Modern Piggy Bank struggle to some degree to save our money and make it go further. That’s why we set this website up. But when you get down to the bottom line, saving money isn’t rocket science (although Mike actually does rocket science).

If you’re looking for ways to shop the best deals on luxury items or make a quick buck by taking surveys online, this isn’t the website for you. There are plenty of great websites out there that will tell you how to do this. We are focused on other things, real ideas, true techniques, anything and everything that will help you grow your wealth and yourself.

Actual experiences right from our own lives

And with all that, welcome to The Modern Piggy Bank.

-Will Hershon

-Mike Andriopoulos

A Random Walk Down Wall Street

Everytime. 7/10

Our Rating: 7/10

A Random Walk Down Wall Street by Burton Malkiel

A classic and essential reading for those seeking to further educate themselves on the financial markets. This book reads like an informal textbook that will teach concepts, provide real world examples with accompanying charts, and keep readers entertained with stories and anecdotes.

The author is a Princeton economist who is a champion of the efficient market theory. He begins with a brief history of financial bubbles that most people will think too crazy to be true. But we here at The Modern Piggy Bank looked more into these and were shocked at how irrational crowds can be and how strong mob mentality is.

Next, he shows how the biggest money managers on the street invest. Lastly, the information is wrapped up with practical ways for the average person to invest their money for the long run.

“Forecasts are difficult to make- particularly those about the future”

Malkiel argues that most money managers charge high fees for strategies that 1) not guaranteed to beat the market and 2) are strategies most investors can employ for a significantly lower cost. Malkiel’s main theory is that individual returns are random at best so no one can consistently beat the market.

We enjoyed this book as it shows, with real data, that money managers might not be the geniuses the media portrays them to be. However, our thoughts diverge in that to truly believe in Random Walk you must also believe that investors like Warren Buffet and Ray Dalio, who have consistently beat the market over the long term, don’t actually have an edge.

A paperback copy can cost around $13 on amazon and is a must read for anyone interested in the market. Just click on the link to be redirected to amazon: A Random Walk down Wall Street: The Time-tested Strategy for Successful Investing

Rich Dad Poor Dad

Hotly Debated. Ultimate Rating: 5/10

Our Rating: 5/10

This relatively short read on the importance of personal finance and investing has us in a huge debate here at The Modern Piggy Bank. One of us loves it and thinks it is a great start to learning personal finance and investing while another one personally hates it and think there is no practical advice. Regardless, here is our unbiased review.

The book reads as a series of short stories littered with financial advice. It follows the authors life from childhood to adulthood and sheds some light on how he was able to build his fortune through the years. Kiyosaki will routinely talk about how he consolidated expenses while seeking investment opportunities and follow it with practical knowledge of finance and accounting that can be applied to daily life.

This book can be an amazing starting point as to how to get in the mindset of wealthy money minded individuals. The ability to look at someone’s experiences and learn how they came up with an original investment idea while minimizing personal expenses can really cause one to re-evaluate what they are doing with their own finances. Kiyosaki was born into a middle class family that was us savvy with their finances, but his mentor was a prominent businessman, so the book allows you to see what separates a money minded person from the average.

What the book lacks is sound financial advice, especially when it comes to investments. Kiyosaki built his wealth during much of the 80’s and 90’s when the regulatory landscape was a bit more lax than it is today. The book itself was published in 2001. He will talk freely about securing loans with ease and purchasing low risk financial instruments with dubiously high returns. At The Modern Piggy Bank, we both agree we would not invest in most of the strategies he talks about in the book if they were even still possible.

Overall, the book has sold more than 32 million copies, has been a New York Times bestseller, and has been endorsed by many celebrities and news outlets. On the flip side, critics will say it provides no sound financial advice and reads as a cookie cutter self help book.

We personally believe there is no such thing as a bad book. You can purchase the paperback for less than $10 on Amazon or get the book for free if you google “Rich Dad Poor Dad PDF”. Pick up a copy and let us know what you think.