I recently finished reading Oblivious Investing: Building Wealth by Ignoring the Noise by Mike Piper and found it quite helpful. The book is geared towards the novice investor who feels rather overwhelmed by investing and investment language (like me). Told in story format, the book covers the basics for creating your investing plan and 10 steps to help you tune out all the “noise” around investing. It’s a quick read of approximately 120 pages. I came away from the book with a much better grasp on the terms that were confusing to me, and with a greater sense of exactly which information is important and which bits I can (and should) ignore.

Part One: The Plan. The overriding theme of this section is that we should make a plan and then stick with it. And once the plan has been implemented, avoid monitoring it. There are sections on creating savings goals (which will then drive the types of investments we choose), where to put money for our various goals, and some historical background on stock vs. bond performance. One of the best pieces of advice I took from Section One, dealt with retirement planning. Piper suggests that its better to plan for retirement savings until death, rather than planning only until our retirement dates.

Part Two: The Noise. Part Two covers all of “noise” that surrounds investing and investment talk. Much of this noise is unnecessary and serves only to confuse us. It also appeals to our emotions, which can cause us to make poor financial decisions. This is where sticking with the plans we’ve created becomes difficult, but extremely important. Piper discusses why day to day market volatility is essentially irrelevant to an oblivious investor and why attempting to time the market is pointless.

Advanced investors will probably not find much new information in Oblivious Investing (though there’s a perspective here that would likely be useful to all). For the novice, however, the information in this book could be just enough to get you out of your basic bank savings account and onto building a better future for yourself. There’s no reason not to begin investing after reading this book; everything you need is right here.

Mike Piper worked for a time at a large brokerage firm and now runs a small tax practice in Chicago. He also blogs at Oblivious Investor. His other sites include Accounting Made Simple and Taxes Made Simple. Oblivious Investing: Building Wealth by Ignoring the Noise is available at Amazon for $9.90.