Chairman of Your Board

The Financial Strategies for Success Model Evolves

By observing and working with clients and students, I have continually updated and refined the Financial Strategies for Success Model. I now use it as a teaching tool or “road map” to help others understand and focus on what successful people have learned and are doing.

 As an adjunct faculty professor, much of the time I counseled people who were struggling. Most often they had no financial plans, were listening to the wrong advisers and were buying the wrong products. The Financial Strategies for Success Model helped me to clear the confusion by focusing on ten major strategies successful people use to simplify and organize their finances. Since we have only a limited amount of time, I believe using it wisely – and learning what successful people do – can greatly improve our lives.

Few people have established any concrete goals. As Earl Nightingale, a well-known management consultant, used to say, “Without goals you will end up like a ship without a rudder, doomed to run aground.” The Financial Strategies for Success Model emphasizes the importance of taking action to establish goals, to get organized and to focus on effective strategies to improve your financial condition.

Chairman of Your Board–Ten $trategie$ to Run “You Inc.”

This book provides guidance in understanding and using various strategies to get organized and become financially successful. It is written to show the strategies successful people have mastered to accumulate wealth, protect it, and pass it on to others. Additionally, this book contains fourteen Worksheets and four Exhibits to help you organize your life and do your job as Chairman of Your Board.

Today’s complex financial situation needs to be simplified so average people can understand what they must do as early as possible. Pass this information on to your loved ones. (See Part IV, “For Your Children Only.” It is written for your children using easy, understandable, proven investing ideas and concepts. Make a copy of this section or ask them to read the few pages to help them get started.)

I have never forgotten what my father once told me when he wished he could be twenty years old again, with the knowledge he had obtained by age forty-eight. It took him that long to figure out what to do and when to do it. Many people are that age or older before they begin preparing for retirement. Unfortunately, by then lack of time makes financial success at the normal retirement age very difficult, if not impossible.

Average people today know they should invest for their future, they just don’t know how. They tend to jump into different kinds of investments and consequently make many mistakes, such as the “shotgun” approach I mistakenly used when I was younger. They have not developed a strategy. Additionally, they are getting older and don’t have enough time for their investments to grow sufficiently. Because they start investing late, they take additional risks (hoping to get higher returns), and they often end up losing everything.

TIP- Many of my wealthy Private Bank clients understood they are the Chairman of Their Board. (See Worksheet 3 “Financial Advisers for Your Board of Directors.”)Realizing they are responsible for whatever happens to them in life, they surround themselves with competent advisers on their “Board.” They seek counsel from their advisers because they can’t be experts in all the needed areas. They also know they ultimately make the final decision and do not expect to blindly follow their advisers’ advice. The idea of “You Inc.” simply means that you should run your personal financial situation the way a successful CEO or Chairman would run a large corporation.

It is ironic, however, that many successful CEOs and Chairmen are so busy running their business corporation that they neglect their personal “You Inc.” corporation and ultimately fall short in their own financial success. Today we need to take charge of our own personal financial situation. No one but you has more self-interest in your financial welfare: not your mother, not your father, not your sister or brother, not your best friend, and not your spouse.

Chairman of Your Board–Ten $trategie$ to Run “You Inc.” contains strategies to run “You Inc.” It is a money machine of successful strategies to use for your entire life. The ten strategies contained in this book plus time and action should be a formula for improving your financial success. Which strategies really do work? Whom can you trust for good advice? It’s all in Chairman of Your Board–Ten $trategie$ to Run “You Inc.”

Teaching the personal finance course at Virginia Commonwealth University for seventeen years and working with my branch and Private Banking clients for thirty-three years in banking, gave me an insight into a cross section of our society. Many people are working harder and harder but are not getting ahead financially. They are going in circles with no real direction. They need to take charge of their personal finances by acting as though they are running a corporation. How? By becoming Chairman of their personal Board of Directors and operating “You Inc.” Learn the secrets successful people know and use, without taking excessive risks.