Who is Phil Town? How can he help you?

For amateur investors who admire the incredible returns produced by Benjamin Graham–Warren Buffett–style value investing but can't figure out how to replicate these billionaires' methods at home, Town's investment guide is manna from heaven.

A former river-rafting guide, Town learned how to calculate such crucial numbers as Return on Investment Capital and Equity Growth Rate from "Wolf," a wealthy rafter whom Town saved from a rapid in 1980. Under Wolf's tutelage, Town learned how to turn $1,000 into $1 million in five years, but the selection of lucrative stocks took weeks of library research. In this engaging and accessible book, Town shows readers how to replicate that sort of exhaustive market research on the Internet—and shorten the research time to just a few hours per stock.

Fans of The Intelligent Investor will recognize that Town's Rule #1 formula—"

1) Find a wonderful business,

2) Know what it's worth as a business,

3) Buy it at 50 percent off,

4) Repeat until very rich"—

is a variation of Benjamin Graham's investment philosophy. (Graham and Buffett are cited heavily throughout the book.)

But Town's ability to break down that philosophy into a detailed, step-by-step program that can be understood by any reader with basic math skills is unique.

His chummy, reassuring tone ("If you're finding yourself already a bit overwhelmed, take a deep breath") will leave readers feeling empowered and ready to manage their money themselves.

Phil Town’s first book, the #1 New York Times bestseller Rule #1, was a guide to stock trading for people who believe they lack the knowledge to trade.  But because many people aren’t ready to go from mutual funds directly into trading without understanding investing—for the long term – he created Payback Time.

Too often, people see long-term investing as “mutual fund contributing” – otherwise known as “long-term hoping.”  But the sad truth is that mutual fund investors are, to a stunning degree, pinning their hopes on an institution that is hopeless.  It turns out that only 4% of fund managers consistently beat the S&P 500 index over the long term, which means that 96% of fund investors see a smaller return on their nest egg than a chimpanzee who simply buys stocks in the 500 biggest companies in America and watches what happens.

But it’s worse than that.  The net effect of hitching your wagon to mutual funds is that over a lifetime they’ll fritter away as much 60% of your nest egg in fees.  Once you understand how funds engineer this, you’ll rush  to invest on your own.

Payback Time’s risk-free approach is called “stockpiling” and it’s how billionaires get rich in bad markets.  It’s a set of rules for investing (not trading but investing) in the right businesses at the right time -- rules that will ensure you make the big money.