About this ebook
What your real hourly rate is, once the commute and the unpaid overtime are counted. What that loan will cost you in total rather than per month. How long your savings would actually last. What a one per cent fee does over thirty years. Whether the pay rise survives inflation. What you would need to never work again.
Most people have never computed a single one of these, and the gap between what they assume and what the arithmetic says is usually enormous.
EVERY CALCULATION HAS THE SAME SEVEN PARTS
- The question it answers, in plain words
- Why this one matters, and what people get wrong
- What you need: the inputs, listed before you start
- The calculation: numbered steps in words. No algebra, no spreadsheet
- A worked example, laid out like a receipt with the answer on the total line
- What the answer means: three bands, so a number becomes a judgement
- The thing people get wrong: the error that makes the answer flattering
THIS BOOK HAS NO COUNTRY IN IT. No account types, no government schemes, no tax rules - and no currency symbol anywhere in its pages. Not a dollar, not a pound, not a rupee, not a naira, not a peso. The arithmetic of a loan, a fee, a savings rate or a commute is identical in every currency on earth. Read the figures as your own money.
IT WILL NOT TELL YOU WHAT TO BUY. No product, provider, fund or company is named anywhere, and none is recommended. It makes no predictions and promises nothing. It teaches you the sums, so you can evaluate whatever is put in front of you - including the arithmetic that shows in ninety seconds why a guaranteed high return cannot be what it claims.
AT THE BACK: a one-page dashboard of the eight numbers worth knowing for life, and an index that finds the calculation by the question you are actually asking.
This is not financial advice and the author is not a financial adviser. It is arithmetic. For anything large or hard to reverse, see somebody qualified and regulated where you live.
