Max Edison

If Max Edison is not the best-dressed personal finance writer in America today, he certainly is the funniest. Even better than Dave Barry, sometimes.

Unlike most financial self-help authors, Max didn’t go to a fancy school and muck about with abstract supply-and-demand algorithms while diddling the dean’s daughter. No, he was sitting in the bathtub one day when he recognized that a lot of corporations were chiseling money away from everyday Americans and that these people ended up spending a fair amount of their lives just paying for bad deals and outright scams foisted upon them by these so-called upstanding corporations. Max decided to do something about it. First he took jobs in finance-related fields and read a lot of really boring bank literature.

Then he launched his own crusade to help the little guy fight back, first by writing Beat the Bill Collector: How to Obtain Freedom from Your Debt. He followed up with Financial Freedom Now: How to Work Less and Live More.

While researching Financial Freedom Now, he repaired his own credit and achieved debt-free status. (Well, except for his student loans, but it’s tough to get money at that kind of low interest rate, so he’s in no hurry to pay them off.) Shortly after he sent it off to Paladin Press to be published, Max bought half of the pawnshop mentioned in the book and moved to Somewhere in Minnesota to run it. It’s the closest thing to getting paid for not working that he’s ever found.

Politically, Max is a die-hard Libertarian and is afflicted by all the strange sorts of ideas these creatures tend to have (tort reform, free speech, right to carry machine guns, gold standard, etc.)

He is married to his best friend and adventuring companion, Lori (see photos). It seems like a pretty good deal so far. He has no pets and no children he is aware of.

He writes sporadically, often buzzed on beer and muttering darkly under his breath. He gets all his ideas from reading the "Terms and Conditions of Your Account" fliers that come with credit card offers. Currently, he’s working on a book of essays about bee keeping, which will actually be more fun to read than it sounds.

When he dies, Max plans to be shot into space in a giant talking sarcophagus, along with his wife, some food and gold, and any servants he might have at the time.