The Coffeehouse Investor How to Build Wealth Ignore Wall Street and Get On With Your Life

The Coffeehouse Investor How to Build Wealth Ignore Wall Street and Get On With Your Life

In “The Coffeehouse Investor,” Bill Schultheis shows readers that by focusing more on their passions and creativity, and less on money and the hype and hysteria of Wall Street, they will actually build more wealth—and improve the quality of their lives at the same time. The prose may be charming, but the investment advice is powerful and timely. Successful investing has nothing to do with “hot” stocks and “cool” mutual funds, but is achieved by adhering to the three simple steps set forth in “The Coffeehouse Investor.”

There are ways to simplify investment decisions when building a sophisticated portfolio. With just a minimum of effort investors can learn to implement these steps and begin the gratifying process of building wealth, ignoring Wall Street, and getting on with life.

User Ratings and Reviews

3 Stars Love it or hate it
I agree with other reviews that point out that this book could be reduced to be basically a pamphlet with the main points. In fact, the web site for the coffee house investor pretty much does just that. What is it that fills the pages you ask? Stories of climing mountains, baking pumpkin pies and life in Seattle. Now, I’m not saying that’s bad, but I am saying it tends to get pretty off topic in several parts of the book. It’s not a wonder why it took the author so long to find a publisher. That being said, the author makes good, clear, understandable points that anyone can follow. He is not trying to teach anyone how to get rich quickly or beat the market, just the opposite. His approach is to create a balanced portfolio made up of mostly index funds and keep putting money into the account regularly. He also makes a good point in the book about why working with financial advisors is a huge drain on your earnings, I loved his charts on this. Bottom line, if you can match the market’s returns year after year on your own by investing in low cost (expenses) index mutual/bond funds why hire someone to do this work for you who will put you into loaded funds with high expenses and fees plus pay them a commission on top of that? The answer really is 1) you hope they can beat the market (which only 20% of mutual funds have done historically) and 2) that they’ll prevent you from doing something incredibly stupid that could cause you to lose even more than you would lose through fees paid.

2 Stars Short Book to Whet Your Appetite on Indexing
This book could work if the goal is to introduce an investor to the concept of efficient markets and index investing. However it is a little too laid back and short on content. It is easily skimmed, and summarizes the major points of how you can’t beat the market, how indexing and low expenses work. However I doubt that someone serious about revamping their portfolio or changing their investing style would be convinced from this short book to do the overhaul. I would say that at the minimum, this book would whet your appetite to explore further. Three books I would recommend are Bernstein’s Four Pillars of Investing, Rick Ferri’s All About Asset Allocation, and John Bogle’s The Little Book of Common Sense Investing. These books furnish the investor with the education, the rationale, the evidence, studies and statistics, as well as the practical how-to’s of assembling a personal portfolio and sticking to it. Otherwise, someone reading the Coffeehouse Investor would just treat Indexing as another investment fad, and abandon it when the next bear market hits, not understanding risk/reward, diversification, correlation, asset allocation and rebalancing.

4 Stars The Coffeehouse Investor
After five years of honing skills as an individual stock investor, I realized there’s got to be a better way. And this book is a simple guide to a stress free, but strategic method. With the gyrations of the market currently, Bill’s philosophy is a remedy for riding the waves and sleeping easier. Thanks, Bill.

5 Stars Calming your investor emotions
This is an excellent, short book that puts an individual’s emotion in perspective. It illustrates the simple principles to basic investments that will not consume much of your noncareer working hours.

5 Stars The right way to make money in the stock market
Wish I had read this a long time ago.

First read this three years ago. Have made a bundle using this method of investing.

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