Flipping Burgers to Flipping Millions

March 21, 2011
Kelly started working the fryer at McDonald's just out of high school, was promoted to store manager at 25, and now at 30, he's an operations consultant overseeing six stores and his net worth is more than 30 times the median net worth of his peersâall through sheer not hard work. He sets out to tell readers how they can become financially free, even if they're flipping burgersâbut succeeds only in presenting the basics vaguely and without nuance. He touches briefly on the virtues of financial freedom, hard work, creating financial goals, living below your means, and retirement planningâbut barely scratches the surface on any subject. Kelly squanders his opportunity to really mine his experience for sound advice, instead he fritters away the reader's patience with odes to his employer, a self-important tone, and the barest of financial advice.

April 15, 2011

A McDonald's employee saves his money and writes a financial-advice book.

Career McDonald's employee Kelly has turned an average job into a financial success, and he lays out the simple steps that have allowed him to do so. The author begins by writing of the desire for financial freedom that he first felt at the young age of 17, which led him to forgo his plans to backpack across Europe and fill out a McDonald's application instead. There are three paths to financial security, Kelly writes, and they are all based on the assumption that one can earn a 7 percent return on investment during the first 8 years of a savings program, and 10 percent every year thereafter. There's the good option, which would require readers to stow away 10 percent of every paycheck for 8 years; the better option, which would see them banking 20 percent; and the best option, which would require readers to live on $1,430 a month, averaging 44 percent savings over 8 years. The author recognizes that the high interest rates he cites sound unrealistic, but he writes that investment in McDonald's stock can provide that type of return. This is not the only instance in which the author glorifies his employer—the entire book is rife with pro-McDonald's sentiment. Kelly's prose is straightforward and simple, much like the book's content, and his tough-love approach to savings is particularly resonant, if a little disheartening, in the current economic climate.

One question remains: Is this a financial self-help resource or a slick McDonald's PR campaign? 

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)