RRSPs: The Definitive Book On Registered Retirement Savings Plans

by Preet Banerjee

The definitive book on Registered Retirement Savings Plans for Canadians. 41 strategies discussed complete with examples. Don't pay a cent more in tax than you absolutely have to! Up to date for 2007/2008.

Genres: Money

231 pages, Paperback

First published February 6, 2008

Reviews

[Blair Conrad · Rating 3 out of 5]

Disclaimer: I won this book. Preet Banerjee provided the prize, but did not run the contest or select me as the winner. I do follow Mr. Banerjee's blog, WhereDoesAllMyMoneyGo.com, but am in no way affiliated with or beholden to Mr. Banerjee. My opinion/review was not solicited.

Overall, a pretty good book that contains useful information about RRSPs. The strategies range from extremely basic and introductory, right up to some fairly advanced analysis of whether you should pay down your mortgage or bolster your RRSP. Mr. Banerjee's writing style is definitely warm and conversational, and so should put readers of any level of investing experience at ease - this is an important point in a book that covers introductory material. Oh, about that - books that cover a range of material are difficult to do well - it's hard to write so that you neither bore the advanced readers nor lose the less experienced ones. I think that by structuring the book in the way he has - a series of strategies that can be read mostly independently, the author has done a pretty good job.

I have to comment on something that really disappointed me about this book, though - it seems that nearly no care was taken in the editing of the book. I would guess that either Mr. Banerjee self-edited, or that he engaged an amateur editor to do the job for him. The book is rife with grammatical errors, including the near-ubiquitous use of "it's" for "its" and confusing "i.e." and "e.g.". Likewise there were disturbing inconsistencies - sometimes we read about "RRSP's" and sometimes "RRSPs"; sometimes sideways emoticons are used to convey tone, and sometimes wingdings. These errors or problems don't significantly impact the quality of the book - they don't detract from the content - but they do change the way the reader perceives the book, and if I were a novice investor, I might've started to become concerned about the content. As it is, I'm familiar with many of the concepts discussed in the book - enough so that I was able to evaluate the coverage of the basic and intermediate strategies and become confident that Mr. Banerjee did know what he was talking about.

Worse than the cosmetic problems, in a couple of places there are deficiencies in the text that could cause significant difficulties for the reader. The graphs in strategy 26 are poorly-rendered - it's difficult to make out the legend, and the reader may not even be aware that what's called the "light-coloured line" is even a line. Worse, the text refers to the green and yellow areas on one of the graphs, which are rendered in shades of grey. These problems make what is arguably one of the more complicated strategies in the book near-incomprehensible on the first pass - I had to reread the section before I could figure out what the text was intending to say.

As I said, this is a pretty good book - the small problems I point out do not make it a bad one, but they do prevent it from being a great book. I realize that creating a book is a daunting task, one that Mr. Banerjee did in his own time, and that he was likely strapped for both time and resources, but I hope that he will take more care - engaging professional or at least talented amateur editors for his future projects.