It isn’t a bad financial advice book, but the content has been said before:

• Save a little bit every month, even if you can’t afford to save much.
• Take advantage of your 401k at work and of IRAs; tax deferred savings grows faster than investments you have to pay taxes on can grow.
• You don’t have to be a genius to make money investing if you invest in stock market index funds.

Plus, Armchair Millionaire was published in 2001 and looks like it was written in 2000, just post peak 1990s crazy market boom. So all the examples are very optimistic, ie assume a 10% rate of return per year, and the charts don’t have much in the way of valleys, just jaggedness in the pretty upward-sloping line.

People did get returns like that in the 1990s, but most retirement planning/financial advice books and calculators assume numbers more like 8%, and the difference in those two rates of return over 40 years works out to be huge. And as everyone who has not been in a coma for the last 5 years knows, sometimes stock market bubbles burst and the lines on the chart slope down.

I did like the fact that the authors mention investment clubs and other supportive ways that people can learn to invest regularly and get education and support around saving and investing. This should not be a surprise, as co-author Douglas Gerlach has written for Better Investing and coauthored another book on managing an investment club. But this book seems dated.