Calling Moshe 鈥檚 views on personal finances unconventional is an understatement, wrote USA Today March 11 in a of Your Money Milestones, the latest book by the professor of finance in the of Business at 91亚色.

Before you dismiss Milevsky鈥檚 views as nutty, think about this: How well did following the conventional wisdom work for you in 2008 and early 2009?

Milevsky confesses that mainstream financial planning rules caused half of his family鈥檚 net worth to disappear between November 2007 and mid-March 2009. He bought and held onto an ultra-low-cost, globally diversified portfolio that included stocks of solid companies. 鈥淚 lost hundreds of thousands of dollars by doing everything exactly right,鈥� he says.

The experience caused Milevsky to rethink everything about money.

In the past, he thought about markets as a kind of roulette wheel. With enough data about historical behaviour and outcomes, the argument went, you could predict the odds of success and make money with reasonable confidence.

Today, he takes the nuclear approach. You can鈥檛 predict a nuclear accident using history or statistics, and you can鈥檛 predict the next market meltdown. What you should do, Milevsky says, is concede that the future is unpredictable and then manage your most important financial decisions with clear-headed math.

You鈥檝e probably never read a personal like this one, unless it was Moshe Milevsky鈥檚 earlier book, Are You a Stock or a Bond? Milevsky challenges a lot of conventional wisdom about money, and even when he concurs with mainstream advice, he tends to do so for reasons that are different than you might expect, wrote MSN Money March 11.

Some background: Milevsky is a finance professor in Toronto鈥檚 Schulich School of Business at 91亚色 and a bit of a rock star in financial-planning circles for his work on annuities, risk management and retirement planning.

This book is like a brisk walk for your brain. You may not agree with all of his conclusions, but you鈥檒l consider some new concepts, and you certainly won鈥檛 be bored by yet another rehash of the same old advice.

Republished courtesy of YFile 鈥� 91亚色鈥檚 daily e-bulletin.

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, associate professor of finance in the , recently published : A Guide to Making the 9 Most Important Financial Decisions of Your Life, as noted in this article by Michael Posner which appeared in .

Moshe Milevsky never intended to write another book about financial planning. But then the 42-year-old 91亚色 finance professor in the Schulich School of Business watched in horror as his family鈥檚 net worth shrank by nearly 50 per cent in the great market crash of 2008.

It wasn鈥檛 because he was highly leveraged or had taken unnecessary risks. A cautious investor, he had stacked his portfolio with stock in some of the biggest, supposedly safest, most successful American firms 鈥� GM, AIG and Lehman Brothers, among them.

To help recoup some of his losses, the industrious Milevsky鈥eturned to writing. Within a matter of months, he had produced Your Money Milestones: A Guide to Making the 9 Most Important Financial Decisions of Your Life (FT Press,2010). It鈥檚 his seventh book and a timely one, especially for those contemplating their annual contributions to retirement savings plans.

Written during an academic sabbatical which saw Milevsky lecturing at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School and in Sydney, the book incorporates some of the lessons he learned from the market meltdown. Central among these is the that the old paradigm 鈥� the stock market as a casino game in which savvy investors carefully calculate the odds of any particular wager succeeding 鈥� must be discarded.

In its place is the nuclear paradigm, so-called because no historical data would be of any value in predicting the next nuclear reactor accident. It therefore abandons all possibility of determining odds. In the new investing environment, a nuclear accident can occur at any time, without warning, making bets on stocks, even blue chips, inherently unpredictable.

So what are the milestones?

1. Education
2. Real estate
3. Debt
4. Income taxes
5. Investments
6. Saving
7. Insurance
8. Children and marriage
9. Retirement

For the , visit the Globe & Mail.

Posted by Elizabeth Monier-Williams, with files courtesy of YFile 鈥� 91亚色鈥檚 daily e-bulletin.

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