How to grow and protect your wealth
It all began in the late 1970s as I was learning the ropes of the financial markets by visiting brokerage houses. Back then there was no internet or cell phones so you either had to call a broker direct or else go there personally. I asked lots of questions of successful investors to try to learn how they became successful.
Not long after, I began my career in the financial services industry while still teaching high school American history. At the time you could teach a balanced approach to our history for the most part, but financial education in our public schools was virtually nonexistent. I quickly realized it wasn’t just that most students didn’t know the difference between a stock and a bond, but they also didn’t know basic skills such as balancing a checkbook or how to buy insurance, a car or a house, let alone how a mortgage works. After many efforts and a lot of setbacks, I finally got approval to develop and teach basic finances to my students, which proved fulfilling to me and financially rewarding for them (at least the ones who listened!).
Fast forward to today and here are some timeless concepts that are still used to grow and protect wealth for my clients.
First and foremost is meeting each individual financial need, and the next one would be understanding the rule of 72. In my radio program this past February on WEEU, I spent some time with this one, as well, which says divide interest into the number 72 to see how fast your money will double. For example, if you invest $100,000.00 at 6% interest, it will double in about 12 years since 72 divided by 6 equals 12.
Time and interest will be your financial friends and they will work for you 24/7 and they never get tired or need time off!
The next basic concept is to save money on all forms of insurance, and in life insurance in particular. The correct kind of life insurance is low-cost level term because it generally gives far more insurance for far less money and is much simpler to understand and follow. It should also be noted no insurance should be purchased until and if it is needed in the first place.
As soon as possible a great investment can be found in indexed annuities. They follow the stock market indexes such as the S&P500 only when they go up and therefore if done correctly you will never lose money with them. If anyone believes the market can’t drop just go back to the year 2000 when the tech bubble burst, the financial meltdown of 2008 or the effects of COVID in the first half of 2020.
A skilled financial professional should be able to help you set up one of these accounts so that you will never pay any fees, commissions, current taxes, probate (a legal process of validating a will for an estate purpose) or downside risk of any kind. Believe it or not you can often get up to a 10% bonus on the first day just for opening the account.
This type of annuity has other important advantages too numerous to list here, and to sum it up, I have never come across any investment anywhere grows and protects wealth like these do.
I have often thought if only our schools were teaching some of these basic principles how much more prosperous our whole nation would be and how much the rising tide would lift all the economic boats. that your