
The personal finance book for people who want to
build, not just preserve.
Most people are taught to avoid debt — to pay it down quickly, stay out of trouble, and live within their means. That advice is not wrong. But it is incomplete. For anyone trying to build wealth rather than simply protect what they have, it is dangerously limiting.
Borrow This Book! makes the case for a different relationship with debt — one built not on fear or indulgence, but on discipline, analysis, and a clear understanding of what borrowed capital can and cannot do. Drawing on forty years of building and selling two companies, the book argues that wealthy people don't avoid debt. They evaluate it as capital with a cost and ask whether it can be deployed at a return meaningfully higher than what they are paying to borrow. The gap between that framework and the one most readers inherit is where wealth gets built or foregone.
The book is structured around case studies documented with specific numbers — a $5,000 loan at eighteen that became a mobile DJ business, a $1.6 million mortgage at 2.75% deployed at 10%, a $345,000 development loss, a Manhattan office that cost nearly $3 million in opportunity cost and direct loss, and the smaller decisions that compounded into a forty-year education. These are not illustrative examples invented for the page. They are decisions with specific dates, dollar amounts, and honest accounting of outcomes both good and bad.

Michael Reichwald is an entrepreneur and business executive who has spent more than four decades building and leading companies. He is the founder and former president of Yorkson Legal, a national legal staffing and services company that placed attorneys and paralegals at leading law firms and corporate legal departments across the United States. Under his leadership, the company grew steadily for two decades before being acquired by a large legal services organization in 2022.
Earlier in his career, Michael founded Brilliant Image, a computer graphics services company that grew into a multi-million-dollar business and was sold in 1999. Through these ventures, he developed extensive firsthand experience in how capital, leverage, and strategic borrowing can be used to launch, expand, and scale successful enterprises — and how each of those tools can go wrong.
He holds a BA in Economics from New York University and an MBA from Baruch College. He lives in New York.
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