Books
NO WORRIES
How To Live A Stress-free Financial Life
This is not about millions of tiny decisions that drain the joy from life, like skipping daily coffee to save a few bucks. And it’s not simply about having more money.
The secret lies in adopting the right attitude to money and getting a small number of big things right.
In his unique style, drawing on decades of expertise, finance expert Jared Dillian tells the truths about essential personal finance topics and helps you to see things as you never have before.
Jared reveals:
- how the right kind of abundance mindset works wonders
- how to purge the urge to splurge (without making life a drag)
- the most effective ways to use credit cards that no one tells you about
- the smart ways to buy big-ticket items, from houses to cars
- what’s gone wrong with student loans and how to use them sensibly
- how to ace investing with the set-and-forget Awesome Portfolio.
No matter where you’re at, Jared can help you get your finances in better shape than 99% of other people – so that you can get on with your life as your wealth builds.
Do that and you’ll have no financial stress, and no worries.
THOSE BASTARDS
69 Essays on Life, Creativity, and Meaning
What happens to us after we die? Why should you play the tuba? Why should you never wear cargo shorts? What are the keys to a successful marriage? Why do some people commit suicide, but others don’t?
This sparkling collection of essays sets out to answer these questions and more.
With empathy, curiosity, and candor, Jared Dillian dives headlong into the central questions of existence with eyes wide open, observing life in a way that only he can. Alternately funny and sad, Those Bastards takes you on an emotional roller coaster, drawing heavily on Dillian’s experience with debilitating mental illness and his professional failures, and overflowing with sharp critiques on music and culture. He moves effortlessly from topic to topic, in one essay riffing on how to use Twitter with honesty and integrity, and in another, describing his experience at the World Trade Center on 9/11.
Those Bastards is a literary sensation, filled with insights on what it means to be human, struggling in a world of uncertainty.
ALL THE EVIL
OF THIS WORLD
There are humans behind the big, bad vilified banks, there are humans behind the calculations of Wall Street, there are humans behind all the legal and illegal financial machinations in the news–they are not always the best humans, and they are not always the worst humans, but All The Evil Of This World tells their stories with abundant curiosity, sympathy, and honesty.
On March 2nd, 2000, the technology company 3Com spun off its insanely profitable hand-held computer subsidiary, Palm. It was one of the most fascinatingly high profile and complex and bungled trades in history, but All The Evil Of This World isn’t about the millions and millions of dollars that instantly came into play, it’s about seven separate voices from seven separate individuals (an ambitious low-level clerk fresh out of school, a drug-addicted, party-throwing broker with bad taste and gross amounts of money, a seemingly infallible hedge fund manager tortured by his own good luck, to name a few) and the 3Com/Palm trade is what weaves their stories together. They all collide into it and out of it, and it sometimes unites them, implodes them, saves them, or destroys them.
This book is not for the faint of heart–these characters are just as troubled and intense and volatile as their surroundings, and the writing pulls not a single punch–but it’s an unrelenting examination into a cast of characters that I think we rarely examine fairly or patiently, and who we often find it easy to dehumanize. The people who inhabit this world aren't cartoon heroes or villains–as it turns out, people who happen to handle large amounts of money for a living–are just people, with shortcomings, just like you and I.
STREET FREAK
Money and Madness at Lehman Brothers
When Jared Dillian joined Lehman Brothers in 2001, he fulfilled a life-long dream to make it on Wall Street—but he had no idea how close to the edge the job would take him.
Like Michael Lewis’s classic Liar’s Poker, Jared Dillian’s Street Freak takes readers behind the scenes of the legendary Lehman Brothers, exposing its outrageous and often hilarious corporate culture.
In this ultracompetitive Ivy League world where men would flip over each other’s ties to check out the labels (also known as the “Lehman Handshake”), Dillian was an outsider as an ex-military, working-class guy in a Men’s Wearhouse suit. But he was scrappy and determined; in interviews he told potential managers that, “Nobody can work harder than me. Nobody is willing to put in the hours I will put in. I am insane.” As it turned out, on Wall Street insanity is not an undesirable quality.
Dillian rose from green associate, checking IDs at the entrance to the trading floor in the paranoid days following 9/11, to become an integral part of Lehman’s culture in its final years as the firm’s head Exchange-Traded Fund (ETF) trader. More than $1 trillion in wealth passed through his hands, but at the cost of an untold number of smashed telephones and tape dispensers. Over time, the exhilarating and explosively stressful job took its toll on him. The extreme highs and lows of the trading floor masked and exacerbated the symptoms of Dillian’s undiagnosed bipolar and obsessive compulsive disorders, leading to a downward spiral that eventually landed him in a psychiatric ward.
Dillian put his life back together, returning to work healthier than ever before, but Lehman itself had seemingly gone mad, having made outrageous bets on commercial real estate, and was quickly headed for self-destruction.
A raucous account of the final years of Lehman Brothers, from 9/11 at its World Financial Center offices through the firm’s bankruptcy, including vivid portraits of trading-floor culture, the financial meltdown, and the company’s ultimate collapse, Street Freak is a raw, visceral, and wholly original memoir of life inside the belly of the beast during the most tumultuous time in financial history. In his electrifying and fresh voice, Dillian takes readers on a wild ride through madness and back, both inside Lehman Brothers and himself.