ISBN1419540491

***I would urge anyone considering taking a course in financial planning to avoid any class that uses this textbook -- it's THAT bad.***

I'm taking a financial planning class and this is the required textbook. I don't know why the instructors chose to use this book -- it's awful. Perhaps one of the worst textbooks I've ever seen. The instructors must be getting a kick-back from the publisher -- that's the only thing that would explain their selection.

At first glance, the book looks interesting and seems well put-together. Flip through and you'll find they have plenty of charts, graphs, and tables, and everything looks official and authoritative. However, once you actually start reading, you realize that the authors are *hacks* who don't know what they are talking about and have chosen to try to hide their own ignorance by being as evasive, wishy-washy and obscure as possible. Chapter 18 (on Ethics), consists entirely of legalese. There's no chance for a non-lawyer to make any sense of this section.

The other chapters are equally bad. Chapter 2 (a basic review of Econ 101) has references to the wrong figures, and many of the captions along the side of the page appear to have been accidentally cropped, so that they don't form a complete (or coherent) sentence. And it's clear the publishers didn't bother to hire an editor to do a basic mechanical check to make sure the document looked ok before sending it to print. I think they must have run a spell-check, because I'm not finding spelling errors, but I am finding that the spell-check didn't catch correctly-spelled words that are in the wrong place, thus creating sentences that make no sense. (A $10/hour editor would have caught this stuff.)

And the writing is also very poor. "Strunk & White's Elements of Style" is the bible that your high school English teacher probably gave you to help you avoid the basic pitfalls of composition. But it seems that these authors couldn't procure a copy because they violate just about every rule in the book.
- Passive voice? (yes!)
- over-use of jargon? (check!)
- long sentences that must be read many times before they make sense? (yes)

I'm looking to switch careers and get into financial planning. This course is required reading, thus I'm locked into 10 weeks with this awful book. That's about 800 pages of small print that I have to "master," Or about 80 hours of time devoted to this awful book. And I would gladly spend time reading something that was put together with care and concern, but these authors clearly have *no* respect for their audience.

I would urge anyone considering taking a course in financial planning to avoid any class that uses this textbook. I can't speak to the quality of the other books, but this one is absolutely awful. Being asked to read this book actually feels like an insult.

I agree with a previous comment about the lack of editing and copyediting that was done with this book. There are quite a few mechanical errors. However, this book gives you the bare bones run done of what to expect in fundamentals for the Certified Financial Planner exam. My course used this book and I passed the exam on the first try. If you are interested in this book and becoming a CFP, I would also highly recommend the "Understanding Your Financial Calculator" workbook from BISYS.