A colorful booklet of 104 comics from “Richer Faster Poorer,” a comic strip about human nature when it comes to money—about folks who try to get richer faster and end up poorer.
The get-rich-fast characters take a course in common sense investing taught by Will Hope, a commonsensical, get-rich-slowly professor, aided by a cat who shows more common sense while napping than most humans wide awake.
The comics touch on the topics of personal finance and investing, but in the end, it’s a comic meant to be fun and prompt a laugh or two—or a broad, knowing smile.
In humor there is truth—observe Mark Twain, William Shakespeare, and others. And in this way humor can add to a learning experience.
Common Sense Investing is based on the philosophy of mutual fund investing legend, John C. Bogle. Reduced to a sentence it might be: buy broadly diversified mutual funds at the lowest possible cost, and then hold on to them. Today, it is broadly accepted wisdom.
Bogle is known for showing how this common sense goes against human nature. Instead of “you get what you pay for,” it’s “we investors as a group get precisely what we don’t pay for. So if we pay nothing, we get everything.”—alluding to the devastation from small fees over a long period.
With a background barrage of financial noise about daily market conditions, our human nature is: “Don’t just stand there. Do something!” Bogle shows us that common sense investing requires exactly the opposite: “Don’t do something, just stand there!”—alluding to the need to avoid speculating and to invest for the long-term. Or: “Stay the course.”
Cartoonist B.J. Dewey adds some fun to learning the investing basics.
