J. K. Lasser (1897–1954)

A good reference for people in the industry, NOT for beginners

A must for in-depth information for each tax year. This is a good reference book to find clarification on specific tax concepts. However, it is not great for general tax knowledge as the format is daunting. The font is super small, the pages are giant, and the examples are hard to follow. For some sections, IRS publication may be better than using the book. For other concepts, using two references is helpful. In addition, there is more insight in the book that clarifies specific exclusions and exceptions. I am an Enrolled Agent (EA) and have been preparing tax returns for several years, so I use tax reference materials a lot. It is a good book for people in the industry but too hard for beginners.… (mere)

History of Financial Advice Collection. How to Live within Your Income (1948) and Managing Your Money, both co-written with the tax-advisor J.K. Lasser, were Porter’s first serious attempts to write popular books of financial advice and cast the problem of “how to match income to outgo” as one of the “major personal problems of our generation.” Porter’s approach was innovative because it replaced the “‘average’ family budgets” of other financial handbooks, that are “inconsistent with the spirit of freedom and independence by which most Americans choose to live” with the “accrual” skills shared by the shopkeeper and giant corporation alike: knowing “what money is coming in tomorrow as well as today” and knowing “also what is to be done with tomorrow’s as well as today’s cash.” Porter is explicit about the gendered nature of the connections between the household and the investment economies. In Managing Your Money, a chapter on annuities, bonds and securities, includes an aside (“Private Note for the Female Division”) in which Porter crisply asserts that the “women of America control 70% of our nation’s wealth” and dismisses those “male pundits” who have chosen to “ridicule the generally respected statistics about the American woman’s financial importance.” She lists statistics that indicate that “women hold a vast percentage of the savings deposits in our country: in New York, they outnumber the men depositors two to one” and that “women represent more than half the stockholders in many of the nation’s greatest corporations.”… (mere)