Image courtesy of GetFinanciallyNaked.com

Tara-Nicholle Nelson
Inman News

Book Review
Title: “Get Financially Naked: How to Talk Money with Your Honey”
Authors: Manisha Thakor and Sharon Kedar
Publisher: Adams Media, December 2009; 208 pages; $12.95

My friend Danielle LaPorte, at WhiteHotTruth.com, recently plead a virtually irrefutable case for the power of an invocation. Initiating any process or experience with a clear, ritualistic statement of your intention sets the energetic stage for both invoker and invokee — or author and reader, when the experience is a book. Invocations make it much more likely that the author’s intention will manifest into reality; that the message will hit its intended mark.

And so it is with the invocation that opens “Get Financially Naked: How to Talk Money with Your Honey” (GFN), wherein authors Manisha Thakor and Sharon Kedar boldly declare, ” ‘Get Financially Naked’ will empower you to live the life that makes your heart sing — on your own and in the context of your romantic relationship.”

A grand statement of intention, this invocation creates big expectations, which, fortunately, the rest of the book does not disappoint.

Best friends who both hold master’s degrees in business administration from Harvard University and are chartered financial analysts, with “Get Financially Naked,” Thakor and Kedar fulfill their promise to provide readers with “the roadmap, language and tactical tools to talk successfully about money” with their partner or spouse.

With money ranking on numerous recent studies as the No. 1 issue couples fight about and the most often-cited reason for divorce, successful money talks between partners seem like an exceedingly worthy aim.

The authors elaborate that their titular command to “Get Financially Naked” is, in fact, a two-step process. The first component of Thakor and Kedar’s financial nudity is for both members of the couple to “get on the same financial page,” learning the skill of having constructive conversations on the subject of money and, thus, minimizing the financial stress on the relationship.

Step 2 involves making smart, joint decisions about money. The authors clarify up front that getting “financially naked” is (a) not an activity to be undertaken by anyone but serious and committed partners, and (b) a way of life to be practiced continuously for the duration of the relationship — it’s not a one-time thing.

Written primarily for women, and replete with examples of women whose lives were disrupted or brought to the brink of ruin by failing to have smart money conversations with their partners, GFN aims to ease the often painful process of creating alignment on money matters within a relationship.

To that end, in Part A, “Own Your Finances, Own Your Life,” readers are guided through a written session of financial therapy, as the authors lead them through visualizing how their lives will be when they begin to live from a position of financial strength, getting clear on their existing financial beliefs and broaching the topic of money with their partner.

Part B, “Talking Money with Your Honey,” guides readers through the process of assessing their financial compatibility with their mate and walks them through five specific, powerful financial questions to answer with their mate — including a couple of questions that explore the impact of each partner’s family financial history on the money area of the relationship.

The final section, Part C, “Time to Get Tactical,” offers actionable tactics, rules and solutions for jointly managing savings, investing and financial planning. A useful appendix offers Thakor’s and Kedar’s answers to frequently asked questions.

“Get Financially Naked” is a short, simple, but smart and deep dive into the money issues that literally tear relationships and marriages apart. While it offers an orderly, calm approach to working through money disconnects and bringing them into alignment for couples who are already fully involved in a joint life, many longtime marrieds will read it and wish they had had these conversations way before getting married or committed.

In fact, GFN would be brilliantly used by couples contemplating spending their lives together, to explore and resolve money issues before they become real issues. Likewise, any woman with a hesitance or dread to confront money issues with herself, her parents, her boss, or anyone else with whom she needs to have money conversations might truly benefit from the therapeutic exercises offered in GFN.

Tara-Nicholle Nelson is author of “The Savvy Woman’s Homebuying Handbook” and “Trillion Dollar Women: Use Your Power to Make Buying and Remodeling Decisions.” Ask her a real estate question online or visit her Web site, www.rethinkrealestate.com.

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Image Courtesy of Viking

Title: Spent: Sex, Evolution and Consumer Behavior
Author: Geoffrey Miller
Publisher: Viking, 2009; 384 pages; $26.95 list

The old marketing adage “sex sells” is to “Spent: Sex, Evolution and Consumer Behavior” as your uncle’s old 35-millimeter vacation movies are to YouTube.

Rather than looking at how “consumerist capitalism” has evolved over the last few hundred years, “Spent” author Geoffrey Miller zooms way out historically speaking, analyzing the often-detrimental buying behaviors of modern Americans — from the purchase of a Hummer to the purchase of a McMansion — from the perspective of Cro-Magnon man (and woman).

At the outset, “Spent” sets forth its basic premise: Modern consumer buying behavior is driven primarily by the age-old instinct to display our fitness for survival to others. Miller posits that this instinct has (barely) evolved since prehistoric times into consumer status-seeking through purchases intended, albeit subconsciously, to display indicators of physical, personality and cognitive fitness of the Darwinian sort.

This is probably the single most enjoyable economics tome I’ve ever read. First off, Miller’s perspective and tone are refreshing and exploratory. His personal position is stoutly neither pro- nor anti-consumerism, but rather thrilled with the mental playground consumer behavior provides his mashup mind.

Miller is fascinated with both the wonderful (e.g., “iPods with ‘Outkast’ and ‘Radiohead’ songs”) and awful (e.g., the “Mall of America”) and wonderful/awful hybrid products and excesses of consumer capitalism (e.g., “Jerry Bruckheimer movies” and “Diet Code Red Mountain Dew”).

Miller relates the origin of his fascination as he experienced intellectual awakenings — a decade apart — to both the power of evolutionary psychology and the virtually inarguable certitude that, as one chapter begins, marketing “has become the most dominant force in human culture.”

After full disclosure of his own position on and path to the subject matter, Miller marries insights frequently neglected by marketers from evolutionary psychology with the recent highlights of research into individual differences.

He cites from sources as disparate as New Mexico bumper sticker slogans, Paris Hilton’s fragrance brands, and academic research into the prevalence of reproduction-impairing parasites to support well-crafted arguments that virtually all consumer-buying behavior arises from an effort by one human to display one of what individual difference researchers call the “Central Six” dimensions: “General Intelligence,” plus the “Big Five” personality traits of openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and emotional stability.

Along the way, Miller sprinkles in some entertaining and provocative parallels from abnormal psychology as he seeks to help the reader detach from his or her consumer identity just a bit by explaining (scarily persuasively) how consumerism falls quite nearly into the clinical diagnostic criteria for narcissism.

There are also several chapters treating different takes on deception, from what Miller calls the “fundamental consumer delusion” that brands matter, to counterfeiting and the self-deception we engage in as to why we make various purchases, to the deceptive appearance of health and fertility created by the appearance of cosmetic and physical fitness, as bolstered by a variety of purchasing behaviors.

He even doles out a couple of real estate tips — strategies to avoid consumerist traps with respect to your biggest purchase. Miller advises prospective homebuyers and community planners to shy away from cookie cutter and shoddily built tract homes and toward building custom homes in already established communities or developing whole subdivisions of well-planned, classically attractive, built-to-last homes.

If you have any interest whatsoever in marketing, psychology or generally why you buy the things you buy, “Spent” will be both an informative and totally entertaining purchase for you to consume.

Image Courtesy of Penguin

Tara-Nicholle Nelson
Inman News

Book Review
Title: Live It, Love It, Earn It: A Woman’s Guide to Financial Freedom
Author: Marianna Olszewski
Publisher: Portfolio, 2009; 272 pages; $24.95

I’ve been working at the intersection of women’s issues and personal finance since 2006, so I was interested to see the deluge of pink women-and-money books onto the market over the last couple of months. And I mean pink quite literally — out of four books on women’s financial planning that are coming out just before or after the New Year, all four have pink as the primary cover color (and two have pink purses on them!).

But aside from a note to publishers to dial down the pink in the future (some women with interests in bettering their finances actually cringe when they see all that rose, mauve and fuchsia), I’ve got no complaints about “Live It, Love It, Earn It: A Woman’s Guide to Financial Freedom.”

Author Marianna Olszewski starts off spinning the very relatable tale of her blue-collar beginnings, including the sides of beef she had to navigate to get from her over-the-butcher-shop apartment on the way to school everyday, from childhood through her success as a self-made broker-dealer and hedge fund marketer.

Hammering home the moral of her personal story (that it is possible to live your dream life, no matter what you’re given to start with), Olszewski segues into her logical, orderly and holistic program of advice for women who crave to transform their lives — and their finances.

“Live It, Love It, Earn It” escorts readers through the experience of lifestyle transformation in three parts, starting with preparing their potential, through embracing financial freedom and to their desired destination: making their dreams a reality. Throughout, Olszewski incorporates accessible, simple steps with mindset management tools — all without insulting her readers’ intelligence.

For example, Part One: Prepare Your Potential features chapters advising readers on some basic rules that will serve them in life and in business, helps them to inject fun and joy into their lives (overall — while fostering their own wellness and without spending much money) and encourages them to build an unshakable belief in their own success potential.

In Part Two, Olszewski teaches her readers to both love and respect their money, working to neutralize past money traumas, eliminate debt and transform their expectations of how terrible, dreary and dull managing their finances can be before creating wealth-building habits like saving, investing, and tax and estate planning.

Part Three is all about action — from being assertive in your career path, to starting your own business, to practicing gratitude.

And interspersed with these brief, powerful lessons are the real-life success stories and interviews with powerhouse businesswomen we know, like Diane Von Furstenberg and Tamara Mellon (the visionary behind Jimmy Choo shoes), and women we’ve never heard of (but should have), including an ambassador, a congresswoman and many other successful business owners.

This book progresses from basic to advanced, covers in broad strokes everything from how to live to how to start and run a business and offers advice ranging from how to accept thanks to how to aggressively, but accurately, manage your tax liability. In short — it multitasks as much as the women it was written for.

Part self-help, part inspiration, part motivation and part instruction, if you (or a woman in your life) have been floundering financially or simply aren’t sure where to get started in changing the direction of your life, I would urge you to read “Live It, Love It, Earn It.”

Tara-Nicholle Nelson is author of “The Savvy Woman’s Homebuying Handbook” and “Trillion Dollar Women: Use Your Power to Make Buying and Remodeling Decisions.” Ask her a real estate question online or visit her Web site, www.rethinkrealestate.com.

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What’s your opinion? Leave your comments below or send a letter to the editor. To contact the writer, click the byline at the top of the story.

Image Courtesy of Vintage

Title: The Architecture of Happiness
Author: Alain de Botton
Publisher: Vintage, 2008; 288 pages; $18 list

Recently, I showed a home to a novice house hunter. From what I’d seen of her personality and tastes, I knew this place wouldn’t be “it” for her, but she wanted to see it anyway. We went in and she took it all in: little tiny windows; dark paneled walls; lots of rooms in a home that already had a pretty low square footage; what I like to call insecurity bars on the windows (that’s when there are bars on the window in an actually pretty nice/safe neighborhood) — and my normally chatty and upbeat client looked at me wide-eyed and summed her emotional reaction to the house up in three words: “I would cry.”

In “The Architecture of Happiness,” writer Alain de Botton explores exactly this phenomenon: the power of buildings to craft and influence our emotions, morality and even the essential nature of who we are as individuals located in a given place. When I use the term beautiful to describe this book, I struggle to decide, much less communicate, which feature is more compelling: the book’s many pictorial images or the verbal ones crafted by de Botton.

First, the pictures and, actually, their captions: They are so vividly illustrative of the arguments being made to their corresponding text as to create an enjoyable architecture of their own, in which one can’t wait to see what buildings de Botton will visually cite next.

To wit, a discussion of famed 1920s modernist architect Le Corbusier’s use of asceticism as a pretext for ushering in a cleaner ideal of beauty is accompanied by an “Advertisement for the 1927 Mercedes Benz, set against” a Le Corbusier cubist home with a flapper-styled woman at the car’s running board.

The caption: “A stage set for actors in an idealized drama about contemporary existence.” A series of contemporary faucets is set against a 1783 study of human facial expressions with the provocative caption, “Who would we want to be friends with?”

Botton’s verbal coverage of structures and his uncomplicated, but non-obvious, extrapolations to conclusions about how they mold us as humans is beyond comprehensive. No building element escapes his artisan-level eye or pen. Urban planning designs, building materials, locations, elegance, balance, order, complexity and even finishes like faucets and flooring — all are analyzed for their power, in architecture, to both reflect and create certain human ideals.

Image Courtesy of Greenleaf Book Group.

Title: Killing Sacred Cows: Overcoming the Financial Myths That Are Destroying Your Prosperity
Author: Garrett B. Gunderson with Stephen Palmer
Publisher: Greenleaf Book Press, 2008; 272 pages; $21.95 list

Myth-busting is not a brand-new concept. Neither is paradigm-shifting. But Garrett Gunderson’s “Killing Sacred Cows: Overcoming the Financial Myths That Are Destroying Your Prosperity” is a novel take on paradigm-shifting dressed as myth-busting, relative to its brethren on the personal finance bookstore shelves.

“Killing Sacred Cows” is a mindset-expanding vehicle for Gunderson’s mission to shatter the foundations of what he sees as counterproductive financial belief systems and replace them with squishy, New Age-y, but potentially powerful new perspectives.

The book’s format — and message — is super-simple: Each chapter houses Gunderson’s attack-and-rethink on an old-school financial doctrine, like: “Financial Security Means Steady Paychecks and Benefits”; “Money is Power”; “High Risks Equal High Returns”; and “Avoid Debt Like the Plague.”

What is novel about “Killing Sacred Cows” is the substance of Gunderson’s offerings as truths to replace the myths. Rather than compiling a bunch of financial proofs to bust myths with facts, Gunderson largely devotes his energies to proposing, explaining and supporting new ways of thinking about these various tenets — then uses stats and data to make a case for the paradigm shift.

When, for instance, Gunderson tackles the age-old, virtually unconscious and universal belief that financial security involves steady paychecks and benefits issued by the government, employers, financial institutions and the like, he explores an empirical study to debunk the myth of financial security by relying on others.

But as the chapter proceeds, Gunderson focuses more on emotional, lifestyle and empowerment implications than on financial calculations in advocating personal responsibility and creating prosperity by producing value in the marketplace as an alternative model for achieving and maintaining financial security.

Similarly, the book exhorts readers to attack the core emotional, mindset and behavioral traps underlying their excessive or dysfunctional indebtedness. Instead of the usual finance book fables of how skipping a daily coffee can get rid of your debt “for good,” Gunderson’s approach acknowledges the utility of right-minded and strategic debt/leverage.

Then, it challenges readers to craft a lasting, personal solution to chronic debt by delving deeper into how the lack of alignment between their consumer behaviors and their life’s “Soul Purpose” gave rise to problematic spending and debting.

The ultimate message of “Killing Sacred Cows” is really more a three-part command to readers. The first is to question essentially everything about conventional financial wisdom, as very little of it is, frankly, that wise or effective. (Five years ago this advice would have seemed pretty “out there,” but I think the country might be open to questioning traditional financial beliefs these days.)

Secondly, the book challenges readers to get and stay clear on the true endgame of all financial pursuits — happiness — and to apply a happiness-creation acid test to every money-related plan, concept and action.

Finally, “Killing Sacred Cows” drills into readers the concept that our “Soul Purpose” and creating value as producers in the marketplace are the ideal media for the pursuit of happiness.

According to Gunderson, financial instruments, insurance and other investment strategies get us closer to prosperity and happiness only to the extent that they are in alignment with or furtherance of the values of purpose and production.

In some ways, “Killing Sacred Cows” is a very New Age, new-school personal finance guidebook that the resistant among us will see as excessively warm, fuzzy and concerned with matters not strictly financial. In others, the book is a throwback to classical economic works that commonly concerned themselves with values and what should be, rather than how to crunch a certain set of numbers or handle a particular type of asset.

If you’re looking for stock tips, this is certainly not the book for you. But if you’re at a place in your life where you’re open to rethinking the core underpinnings of your relationship with money and financial behaviors, read this book — but be ready for some off-the-grid stuff.

Image Courtesy of W.W. Norton & Co.

Title: Busted: Life Inside the Great Mortgage Meltdown
Author: Edmund Andrews
Publisher: W.W. Norton & Co., 2009; 240 pages; $25.95 list

Mea culpa.

So, in essence, begins “Busted: Life Inside the Great Mortgage Meltdown,” by New York Times economics reporter Edmund Andrews. The entire book is succinctly summed up by its first sentence: “If there is anybody who should have avoided the mortgage catastrophe, it is me.”

Andrews goes on to inform the reader that he has covered the economy journalistically, including the Asian and Russian recession of the 1990s, the dot-com bomb of 2000, and the goings on at the Federal Reserve since 2003. Yet in 2004 he “joined millions of otherwise sane Americans in what we now know was a catastrophic binge on overpriced real estate and reckless mortgages.”

“Busted,” from the title on through to the last chapter, “God Save Us All,” does tend toward hyperbolic extremes in both its choices of verbiage and its placing of blame equally on the shoulders of consumers and the banking industry. But perhaps that is appropriate, for a book about the extreme irony of an economics reporter who actually penned several stories in 2004 about the dangers of easy mortgage lending.

Some might argue, myself included, that we American real estate consumers — myself included again — should all be issuing a collective “my bad” for the role our own unsustainable mortgage decision-making and willful suspension of disbelief as to the what-goes-up-must-come-down reality of skyrocketing home values.

Andrews agrees, but assumes super-duper responsibility for his personal mortgage screw-ups, given that he was so close to the center of the mortgage universe that Andrews actually had the occasion to spill the details of his personal mortgage meltdown to former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan in a face-to-face meeting.

“Busted” is a retelling of Andrews’ personal tale of mortgage woe, which, like most mortgage melodramas, arose more from the events and characters involved in the hard-up homeowner’s personal life than any massive financial cataclysm. Andrews didn’t get laid off. He got divorced, and then he got remarried.

His divorce diverted about half of his income to spousal and child support. But he felt the need to kickstart his new life by installing his new wife and their blended set of children in a “stately brick home” that cost him nearly half a million dollars, despite the hit he’d taken to his income and the fact that his new wife was unemployed.

Andrews acknowledges that the home purchase was illogical, but notes how easy it was to make such a gamble, aided by a “don’t ask, don’t tell” loan in which neither his massive family support obligations nor his wife’s lack of income were even asked about by the lender, much less disclosed by Andrews, the borrower.

He goes so far as to call the purchase “a gamble” that he took because “the money was there, and I was in love.”

So starts the mortgage memoir. And it goes on to relate the events of Andrews’ troubled new marriage (money problems) and troubled new mortgage (made seemingly better, but eventually worse by a couple of refis intended to manage escalating credit-card payments.

Andrews excels at using sober hindsight to illuminate the strange logic and true costs of the mortgage manipulations and debt gyrations that seemed so shrewd and commonplace just a couple of years ago.

Image Courtesy of Hachette Book Group

Title: Rich Dad’s Conspiracy of the Rich: The 8 New Rules of Money
Author: Robert Kiyosaki
Publisher: Hachette Book Group, 2009; 272 pages; $12.99 list

I’ve never been a huge conspiracy theorist. Lately, though, my work on behalf of homeowners vis-à-vis their mortgage banks has given me cause to rethink that stance. Banks are uber-competent when they want to be (consider: How many times have you accidentally gotten an extra $20 at the ATM?).

So, I’ve started to wonder whether the extensively illogical and faux-incompetent activity as a theme of many of the loss-mitigation divisions might have an ulterior motive.

I’m just arriving at a place of wondering whether a conspiracy might be afoot. At the end of that same path is popular “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” author Robert Kiyosaki.

In his new book, “Rich Dad’s Conspiracy of the Rich: The 8 New Rules of Money,” Kiyosaki argues hard for his case that the banks, big industry and the ultra-rich have conspired with the federal government to create and maintain the Federal Reserve system, and to keep it flush with the funds of the average Joe — then using those funds to capitalize their own organizations (and those of their cronies) as needed.

Whether or not you agree with “The Da Vinci Code”-esque theme, there is something inarguably powerful about where Kiyosaki goes with it. For him, the upshot of all this conspiracy-speak is twofold. First, readers should stop waiting for salvation from the government and seize control over their own financial destinies.

And second, the way to seize this control is by achieving mastery in understanding money and how it works — or in Kiyosaki’s own words, “Money is knowledge.”

This “Conspiracy” book is, in large part, a financial-education primer, with not-so-common-sense money lessons and inspirational finance messages interwoven with historical chronologies documenting various large-scale financial conspiracies and dilemmas and insights submitted by Kiyosaki’s audience in response to the draft chapters he posted online.

It just so happens to be organized in reference to the various conspiracies comprising Kiyosaki’s theory, e.g., “The Conspiracy Against Our Money,” “The Conspiracy Against Our Wealth,” and “The Conspiracy Against Our Financial Intelligence.”

Some readers will be put off by the excessive conspiracy-speak. My guess is that many who would have grouped these tales of large-scale, intergenerational financial conspiracies right along with UFO tales and crop-circle lore might be primed more favorably in light of the global financial events of the last couple of years.

No matter how you are inclined to feel toward the conspiracy material, the strength of this book is that you could virtually ignore it — if it strikes you wrong, and still glean a number of thought-provoking, change-provoking insights about our collective economic history and your personal financial future.

Image Courtesy of TrialAndHeirs.com

Title: Trial & Heirs: Famous Fortune Fights!
Authors: Andrew W. Mayoras and Danielle B. Mayoras
Publisher: Wise Circle Books, October 2009; 288 pages, $19.95.

Everyone loves a good mashup. Whether the two worlds colliding are Jay-Z with the Beatles, books with video or Wi-Fi café/bookstores (genius!), Charles Darwin himself would be proud of these rapidly multiplying examples of interbreeding of diverse “species” spawning ever more robust progeny.

In that vein, “Trial and Heirs: Famous Fortune Fights” … and what you can learn from celebrity errors — from married estate planning and probate attorney team Andrew and Danielle Mayoras — is the ultimate mashup of voyeurism into celebrity financial scandals and simple, sound estate planning advice.

If TMZ and Bankrate.com had a literary baby, it would be “Trial & Heirs.”

“Trial and Heirs” transforms the potentially eye-glazing, mind-numbing, but obligatory topic of estate planning into an easy-to-read, sometimes comic but always tragically entertaining foray into how the everyman (and woman) can avoid the common asset protection gaffes rendered disastrous in the big-money context of celebrity fortunes.

Sneaking an estate-planning tutorial into a set of case studies of celebrity estate fiascoes, each chapter of “Trial and Heirs” offers not only the facts of the titular “Famous Fortune Fight” being used to illustrate a particular lesson, but also breaks out the moral of each story into “Avoid a Family Fight” tips and offers an educational set of sidebars throughout that convert the legalese of estate planning and probate trials into layperson’s terms.

Don’t let the cover’s cartoonish caricatures of Michael Jackson, Anna Nicole Smith and Princess Diana fool you — this book offers quite a comprehensive, meticulously organized set of need-to-knows and cautionary tales on how to protect your assets for your demise.

Section I is all about wills, and examines the basics, pros and cons, and logistics of the age-old estate-planning document in chapters with titles such as “Is This a Will or a Napkin?”

Each topic and lesson is vividly demonstrated by a story of a celebrity will, covering the post-demise dramas of personalities ranging from Howard Hughes to Heath Ledger.

In Section II, the preferred asset-protection vehicle, a living trust, is explored. The Mayoras again proceed systematically through the basic whats, hows and whys, this time covering the logistics of living trusts, and hanging each lesson on a famous estate battle, past or current.

The authors encourage conscientious attention to estate matters via properly creating and funding a living trust as a means of demonstrating care for family members by helping them avoid the monetary and emotional vampires of will probates and contests later on.

The Mayoras also encourage creative use of living trust clauses and stipulations to ensure that your values for your descendants outlive you, as with the authors’ own client, a plumber made very good, who made sure his grandchildren would maintain a strong work ethic by limiting their inheritance to a match of what they earned in any given year (with exceptions for good cause).

Section III, “People Are Crazy, Relatively Speaking,” offers a primer on mental competency and undue influence — the primary issues contested in many probate court battles.

In Section IV, which covers disputes over assets owned jointly, life insurance proceeds and gifts, the Mayoras let the tales of Princess Di, Whitney Houston’s father, and Marlon Brando demonstrate that relying on “asset planning shortcuts” is inadvisable, to say the least.

And Section V rounds out “Trial & Heirs” with a set of guidelines on selecting and avoiding problems with executors and trustees.

While the majority of the book’s case studies arise from big-dollar, big-exposure famous cases, there are a number of real-life, real-world examples of the authors’ own clients and common-sense planning tips for “normal-sized” estates thrown in for good measure.

For example, readers who wish to provide for disabled relatives without disqualifying them from their medical and disability benefits are schooled about special-needs trusts.

“Trial & Heirs” manages to accomplish a stunning trifecta of near impossibilities for a book about estate planning. Not only does it entertain, it deeply educates and also galvanizes readers into taking action to protect their families and their legacies.

Tara-Nicholle Nelson is author of “The Savvy Woman’s Homebuying Handbook” and “Trillion Dollar Women: Use Your Power to Make Buying and Remodeling Decisions.” Ask her a real estate question online or visit her Web site, www.rethinkrealestate.com.

Image Courtesy of Wiley

Book Review
Title: Loan Modification for Dummies
Authors: Ralph R. Roberts and Lois Maljak
Publisher: Wiley, 2009; 288 pages; $19.99

The subprime, housing and foreclosure 3-in-1 crisis combo meal has spawned a new mortgage vocabulary, the star member of which is the phrase “loan modification,” which refers to any change(s) to a mortgage loan’s payment or other terms, ostensibly intended to help a distressed homeowner hold onto a home.

It sounds simple, but intrepid homeowners who have braved the labyrinthine bizarreness of a mortgage servicer’s loss mitigation department during the odyssey that is a loan modification application process know otherwise.

It’s surprising, then, that very few comprehensive how-to books are devoted to demystifying and illuminating the loan modification process for the literally millions of homeowners whose inquiring minds would like to know.

The call of the wildly clamoring masses (OK, that was a little overly dramatic) has been answered by Realtor and foreclosure expert Ralph R. Roberts and his “second in command,” Lois Maljak, with their new book, “Loan Modification for Dummies.”

“Loan Modification for Dummies” is a thorough, realistic and useful tool and resource for homeowners hoping to convince their lenders to change the terms of their loan. Whether you are just looking to decide whether you’re a good candidate for a loan mod, are trying to figure out whether to hire help with the project (and who to hire), or if you’re looking for a soup-to-nuts Do-It-Yourself guide to loan modification, this book lives up to the For Dummies series slogan of “Making Everything Easier!”

The book respects the complex nature of its subject matter, dividing its approach into five parts. The aim of Part I is to get the reader “Up to Speed on Loan Modification,” giving a basic definition of loan modification, explicating the process and how to expect it to unfold, helping readers assess their current situation and whether other options for resolving a hardship might be more appropriate, and walking readers through the process of deciding whether to hire the project out or go solo.

(Hint: hire. “Hiring a skilled professional almost always delivers better results than trying to get your loan modified yourself.”)

Part II helps the reader get off on the right foot, with an orderly, well-planned approach to submitting the application for a loan modification, and a system for keeping the entire process on track, including instructions for maintaining a conversation log and file of documents. Part III advises homeowners on the sequence of events following the application and through negotiating a final modification, including how to evaluate and counter lender modification offers that do not render the mortgage payment sufficiently affordable to resolve the problem on a long-term basis (a very common issue, in my experience).

In Part IV, Roberts and Maljak provide the ultimate reality-check of the book, devoting an entire fifth of the book to “Dealing with an Uncooperative Lender.” The authors brief readers on the several key, oft-violated lending laws; how to have their own loans audited to detect any violations; and how to hire a professional to help determine whether a lawsuit is a sensible strategy for obtaining the desired results.

(Hint: often, it’s not. “Many lenders are willing to correct broker wrongs but for obvious reasons would prefer to do so out of court and beyond the media spotlight.”) Readers will find a number of other strategies for “applying some legal pressure.”

If you’re a homeowner with a legitimate hardship preventing you from making your mortgage payment who also can document a steady income that would empower you to make a modified mortgage payment, by now I hope you’re already planning to buy this book. As a real estate broker and attorney who formerly negotiated a number of loan modifications, I can tell you firsthand that this system for understanding and conducting yourself in the course of applying for and negotiating a mod will help you and help your professional negotiator get the best results for you.

However, if you weren’t already there, Part V should put you over the top. In this Part, any Dummies’ book’s prototypical Part of Tens, the authors provide two lists of 10 tips. The first one equips you for long-term success at the endeavor of obtaining a loan modification and to help you avoid becoming one of the more than 50 percent of homeowners who obtains a loan modification and re-defaults on their mortgage.

These tips are very good — not super-fancy gyrations, but just really fundamental, really important strategies for, well, keeping your home for a long, long time. They range from moonlighting to make more money to modifying other debt.

The second list shatters 10 loan-mod myths, addressing topics ranging from bankruptcy to paying upfront fees to a loan modification professional.

If I had to make a criticism of “Loan Modification for Dummies,” it would be that the average homeowner who is a novice at these matters might not be able to make an informed decision about how to proceed from the first chapter without also at least first flipping through “Foreclosure Self-Defense for Dummies” and “Bankruptcy for Dummies.”

While there are no guarantees in the world of loan modification, this book contains a full toolbox of knowledge that could help you save thousands of dollars (in reduced monthly mortgage payments) and might even save your home — compared with the $19.99 cover price, that’s not bad at all.