Golfer's Guide to Money: Find your financial swing and master the green

Financial advice for golf lovers.Let's be honest, most personal finance books are boring at best and overwhelming at worst. Most of us would rather be digging in our heels for an impossible bunker shot than trying to digest the latest best-seller on budgeting or stock market investing. That's about to change. . Believe it or not, the game of golf and managing personal finances have a lot in common. They both require a sound strategy, confident decision-making, and execution. Inside Golfer's Guide to Money, you'll learn how the game of golf and the fundamentals of personal finance intersect with stories like: How Bubba Watson's miracle shot at the 2006 Masters serves as a great example of managing risk in your financial life.Why the 12th hole at Augusta National, called "the hardest hole in tournament golf," serves as a perfect model for an investment strategy.What Jack Nicklaus's career can teach us about the timing of your retirement and the stock market.In Golfer's Guide to Money, CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER(TM) , Judson Meinhart, draws from his years of experience as a financial advisor, and average golfer, to show you how to build your own financial swing in order to:Make confident decisions around spending and saving for retirementHave a sound strategy for managing your own financial successExecute on the most important aspects of investingMaster the green!Excerpt from Chapter 8, Wedging and PuttingDriving distance is an easy number for any of us to obsess over because it's easily measured and a very visual part of the game. There are long drive competitions to celebrate big swingers. Golf balls are marketed as "longer," claiming to provide more distance off the tee. We know the names of the biggest drivers on the PGA Tour, but rarely can we name those with the best approach accuracy or putting percentage from 10 feet out.. However, easy measures can become a distraction and can sometimes lead to an undesirable result. We encounter these "false signals" in our financial lives all the time. The kind of car you drive or the size of your house are not accurate indicators of your wealth since they're not really liquid assets and are often acquired with borrowed money. We encounter an equal amount of noise in the financial markets, where there is no shortage of numbers and an even more significant number of opinions. . Investment returns are one of these numbers that get volleyed around a lot, with stock market performance a daily topic on the evening news. Anytime a stock is mentioned on an investment-oriented channel, a chart with recent performance is sure to follow. Even our smartphones have apps that put the minute-by-minute price movements of investments at our fingertips. The noise is easy to find. . It's not noise in the sense that investment returns don't matter. They do. After all, we invest in stocks, mutual funds, and ETFs to make money. However, their daily, weekly, even annual performance has nothing to do with the quality of investment they will be in the future. . About the Author. Judson Meinhart is a CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER(TM) and oversees the financial planning practice for a North Carolina-based wealth management firm. He has been quoted by numerous media outlets, including CNBC, Money, TheStreet, and MarketWatch, on diverse topics such as taxes, saving for retirement, and curbing impulse spending. . He resides in North Carolina with his wife and two children. When not with his family or at work he enjoys the futile quest of a single-digit handicap. . You can find more of his work at judsonmeinhart.com or on Twitter at @CFPjudd.