This is a decent update of the earlier books. It was published after the housing and stock markets started crashing and periodically touches on that as a warning. (Although it's pretty strange that a 2009 author would consider a cellphone a luxury item like he still does.) This edition probably wouldn't be very helpful by itself as it doesn't go back and repeat the basics in the original volume.

Like the first book, it does get redundant. But that's not such a bad thing in this context. The basic goal is to get people to reconsider their need for particular luxury items and everyone has a different trigger. So by having a chapter each for cars, watches, vodka, wine, etc., then everyone is covered. And you can just skim -- or even skip -- the chapters discussing items you don't overspend on. He does customize each product. You don't see the same argument against each luxury good. I did quibble with how he only looks at the relative performance of luxury cars and completely ignores the value of aesthetics.

His examples are still almost exclusively 50-65 year old men, but part of that is to explain how they got where they are so that younger people today can end up there too. Plenty of people who are wealthy in their 30s and 40s turn around and lose it all, so there are arguments against including them in the case studies. He has also written a book specifically about women and money, which I haven't read. But I wasn't impressed that one of his examples of how women are naturally more frugal than men (?!) was that they spend less on average per pair of shoes. Completely ignoring the angle of how *many* pairs they're buying relative to men.

It also bothered me a little that he regularly referred back to his original book and its success without ever mentioning his co-author on it, who was not involved in this one.