 John Steinbeck with his poodle pal Charlie, beatnik Jack Kerouac, and Geoffrey Chaucer with his diverse band on their way to Canterbury, took some of the most memorable literary road trips of all time. In the tradition of writers hitting the road to find a tale worth telling, David Brancaccio of National Public Radio has offered us a refreshing treat among books on money and finance, Squandering Aimlessly, a book about money that will make you laugh out loud. In his financial pilgrimage, Bracaccio visits Wall Street, of course, but also the Mall of America, Leavittown, Las Vegas and the infamous Arizona Biosphere.
David Brancaccio's premise is simple. He will take a journey to learn by the examples of others what to do with a surplus. The size of the surplus is really not the point; it could be 5 dollars or 5 million. Many of us struggle to make ends meet, but you don't really need to have a surplus to think about the ramifications of what to do with a windfall. If you have ever had a flutter with a PowerBall ticket, then you've momentarily paused to consider what that sudden influx of imagined money was intended to do for you, your family or the people around you.
Squandering Aimlessly explores the feelings of surplus and bounty that give us that urge to splurge, to sock it away under a mattress, or to help someone in need. There are no financial sermons of what you should do with your pittance or fortune, but vividly told stories of people who all adopted different strategies and how those strategies panned out. Some invested in their communities, some joined post war suburbia, some ditched the big career to learn to pick the banjo.
Listeners of Public Radio will recognize the voice of David Brancaccio in every sentence of Squandering Aimlessly. It would be unsurprising and rather dull to find out that David Brancaccio is a financially savvy investor who is willing to share formulae and techniques that he has picked up from his radio guests in this book. Buy low, perhaps, sell high. No, this is not a book from a financial wizard showing off his expertise. Brancaccio is as befuddled and innocent about money as any kid with a crisp new dollar in his hand standing in front of a candy counter.
The structure of the book is disarmingly simple. Each chapter follows a prescribed path, each starts with a news clipping where some lucky duck has declared how they will handle their lottery winnings. David Brancacchio then pulls out of the clipping a little motivation for the chapter's theme. It might be spending, gambling, risk, the simple life, charity, life long dreams, financial independence, mortgages, retirement. What then follows are the delectably juicy travelogue details of encounters with traders, card counters, herbalists. At the end of each chapter, there follows a brief summary of the souvenirs of the trip, the to do list for when he gets back, and because he is the voice of Marketplace, after all, a section for "doing the numbers."
On this road trip to find the nature of financial wisdom, David Brancaccio even has the nerve to squeal the tires as he sets out, with his opening lines, "I once saw a naked Belgian accountant carrying nothing but her purse. She made it look easy." Enjoy the ride.
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