September 4, 2000
The man behind Nothing Down: How to Buy Real Estate with Little or Nothing Down is back; this time, he stops just short of promising every reader untold riches. A quick look at the chapter titles--"Infopreneuring: How to Turn a Tiny Classified Ad into a Fortune," "The Internet: Your Next Fortune Is Just a Click Away," etc.--prepares readers for the journey ahead. Allen's basic advice is to get paid multiple times for the same work: write a book or a song or license an innovative idea and collect royalties for years; become a multilevel marketer and get a piece of every sale made by others in the organization. The dollars will literally roll in while you sleep, Allen claims, hardly wasting a comma on the fact that most people fail to create recurring streams of income from these ventures. The hype obscures the sound financial advice he does offer: live well within your means, save regularly and invest a significant portion of your money in index funds. However, Allen doesn't help his case by making it sound as if a 20% return in the stock market is commonplace or by suggesting that engaging in esoteric investment strategies such as writing "covered calls" is as easy as falling off a log, and much more profitable. It is too bad the book doesn't come with a money-back guarantee for readers who don't become millionaires. At least that would have been a sure thing. 150,000 first printing; $300,000 ad/promo; 15-city author tour.