Most personal finance books are trying to sell you something: a course, a newsletter, a model portfolio, an advisor's time. Choose Your Hard isn't. Chad Garner has been a full-time trader and investor for over two decades, through the 2008 crash, the COVID crash, and everything between. He wrote this book for his four kids because nobody else was going to teach them how money actually works, then realized it would help anyone asking the same questions.
The book opens with three ideas that matter more than everything else combined: stay out of debt, know your real numbers, and let compounding work for you instead of against you. From there it goes deeper: renting versus buying, real estate, why most mutual funds and advisor fees quietly cost you far more than you think, a real $700,000 experiment comparing investment approaches, annuities, taxes, and a step-by-step wealth plan you can actually follow.
The back half covers the strategies Garner personally trades every week, including covered calls, naked puts, and iron condors, broken down without the jargon, plus a plain-English look at cryptocurrency.
You'll see exactly how a 1% advisor fee stacked on a 1% mutual fund fee can cost you $1.25 million over a lifetime, and how skipping both puts $5,391,786 in your own pocket instead by retirement, starting from $7,500 a year in a Roth IRA at age 21.
No sales pitch. No course to sign up for. Just the math, the plan, and what to do with it.