Book Plots Strategies for Beginners on Investing Nest Egg

When she was host of an investment program on local cable television, it seemed to Helen Breunig that a lot of folks were asking variations of the same basic question:

How does one safely invest a relatively small amount of money?

With that in mind, the Fullerton author invested a year of concentrated labor and drew on many more years of accumulated research to produce “Nest Egg Investing,” her basic guide to money management recently published by Dow Jones-Irwin.

“Having money is like having a child,” she said. “You can’t just turn it over to a baby sitter, that is, a bank. You’ve got to be in control.”

Peppered with illustrations and delivered in terms that do not require an accountant to translate, the book is designed to be a guide in conservative financial husbandry for the average person.

In the section on choosing a good bank, for example, Breunig lists the nation’s “premier blue banks,” the safest banks as rated by Veribanc Inc., a Massachusetts-based bank rating concern. In California, she notes, there is just one premier blue bank, Mechanics Bank of Richmond.

The book’s core is an examination of strategies for beginning investors: certificates of deposit, treasury bills, money market accounts, individual retirement accounts, Keoughs and Swiss annuities.

For each of these areas, Breunig discusses the different ways funds can be invested and shows the advantages and disadvantages of each strategy. In the section on treasury bills, for example, she outlines how treasury bills, treasury notes and treasury bonds work, presents a table summarizing the differences and amounts needed for investing in each, the interest paid, and then compares the pros and cons of buying directly from a Federal Reserve Bank.

At the end of this and other chapters, a glossary of terms is included.

Breunig’s book, her first, grew from her experience as host of “Money Wise with Helen Breunig,” which ran weekly for three years on several Orange County cable systems. “A lot of people wrote in or called with the same questions,” she said, and thus the idea for the book was born.

Breunig spent about seven months gathering and compiling material and about five months of steady writing before submitting the 299-page manuscript. Editing took another three months. Last month, 12,000 copies, priced at $19.95 each, began flowing into bookstores

Thus far, the book is “off like a shot,” said Dick Luecke, Breunig’s editor at Dow Jones in Homewood, Ill. “We’re really pleased with it.”

But in the arcane world of book publishing, even if Breunig’s book does only moderately well, it still will have outdistanced the effort of hundreds of authors.

Luecke estimates that about 500 book outlines are submitted to him each year and of those, about 25 are published. About 40,000 books are published each year in the United States, but only about half make their way into bookstores. And of those that do earn a space on a bookshelf, only about 5% are sold in sufficient quantity to warrant a reprinting, Luecke said.

Typically, a publisher figures its costs based on just one printing run of a book and produces only the amount of books it figures will sell.

Although her book is designed to help individuals maximize their financial stature, Breunig’s own bank account is unlikely to swell appreciably for her yearlong effort. Depending on sales, which determine royalties, she will receive between $15,000 and $30,000 from the book.

But the perpetually upbeat Breunig is undaunted by the relatively low financial return an author realizes and is already at work on two more books, one an examination of five medium-risk investments--sort of a graduate course to “Nest Egg Investing,” and the other a book on the art of Burma, where she lived for a year while her husband was stationed in Rangoon while working for the United States Information Agency. Her husband, Ed, is now a graphics artist and did three illustrations for “Nest Egg Investing.”

Breunig has taught at UC Riverside, Fullerton College and Orange Coast College. She earned a master’s degree from Cal State Fullerton.