Lessons on the Road to Financial Independence - Softcover

Finkle, H. Michael

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1462083560 ISBN 13: 9781462083565

Verlag: iUniverse, 2012

Inhaltsangabe

Pursuing financial independence is one of the few ways you can attempt to control your own destiny; it provides freedom from so many of the world's forces over which you have absolutely no control. In Lessons on the Road to Financial Independence, financial advisor and author H. Michael Finkle addresses the goal of seeking personal financial independence by sharing his own background and story as well as his investment experiences, values, and advice. In this guide, Finkle takes a chronological journey through his life and career. He shares some of the key life experiences that shaped his values and worldviews and how they helped determine both his life and investment career. Lessons on the Road to Financial Independence presents big-picture observations of the investment world and provides insights into the decision-making process on the journey to major financial and life rewards. Lessons on the Road to Financial Independence shows that through perseverance, planning, discipline, and dedication to the journey, financial independence can be attained. Pursued correctly, seeking financial independence can lead to a life more fully lived and can open doors to an even more rewarding life experience.

Über diesen Titel

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

LESSONS on the Road to Financial Independence

By H. Michael Finkle

iUniverse, Inc.

Copyright © 2012 H. Michael Finkle
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4620-8356-5

Contents

Preface.......................................................................................ixIntroduction..................................................................................xiChapter 1 Financial Independence: Beginnings..................................................1Chapter 2 Money as a Tool.....................................................................4Chapter 3 You Are the Product and Your Most Valuable Asset....................................9Chapter 4 Does Seeking Financial Independence Mean Seeking to Retire?.........................13Chapter 5 Exploiting Long-Wave Opportunities..................................................15Chapter 6 Debt Is a Four-Letter Word..........................................................24Chapter 7 Globalization and You...............................................................31Chapter 8 Building Your Personal Financial Structure the Traditional Way......................34Chapter 9 Managing Your Personal Financial Structure—A Way Forward......................43Chapter 10 Investing More Like an Institution and Less Like an Individual.....................56Chapter 11 Allocating Investments for Today's Bifurcated Worldview............................64Chapter 12 What Role Does Life Insurance Play in Your Game Plan?..............................73Chapter 13 Other Estate and Financial Planning Techniques.....................................77Chapter 14 Gifting............................................................................82Epilogue: Investment Market Reflections and Conclusions.......................................87Reference Notes...............................................................................91Appendix and Disclosures by the Author........................................................101

Chapter One

Financial Independence: Beginnings

I was fortunate to be born into a hardworking, ambitious family right at the beginning of World War II. My parents had their individual challenges and burdens to bear, but they were smart and self-sufficient.

As a child, my father lived in an apartment above the general store that his parents owned and operated. He grew up in a small town in Iowa, to which his family had migrated from Chicago. However, I always viewed his existence as similar to that of a kid living in a large, urban ethnic neighborhood where everyone on the block knew everyone else, and all struggled to scrape out an existence. Behind his house was an alley that separated his yard from a junkyard. My father sometimes regaled my brother and me with stories of selling junk metal to the junkyard owner, often for pennies. Over the years, he used the money he accumulated from this and other entrepreneurial activities to buy fireworks to sell at his annual Fourth of July fireworks stand. Apparently this entrepreneur ran a very profitable stand, for he eventually accumulated enough money to build a new home for himself and his bride in 1940, spending the enormous sum of $4,000 on the endeavor. His own father thought he was absolutely crazy to put his life savings into a home and told him so, but my father was determined to provide a life for his family away from the downtown flat he knew growing up.

At a very early age, I learned directly from my father the virtues of hard work and thrift. He was an interesting blend of prudent businessman and speculator. He was basically very conservative when it came to personal finances, but at the same time willing to take what for him were very large gambles on new ventures. As an ambitious kid who could sell anything, he, like others of his generation, escaped the Depression era through a combination of intelligence, diligence, ambition, and the willingness to risk greatly, but only after careful consideration of all the potential outcomes. He also had great intuition when it came to reading other people.

My mother, on the other hand, had a much tougher childhood. Her father was a brick mason who ran his own masonry company but had a weakness for spirits, and that nearly ruined their lives. A hardworking German immigrant, he knew the life of hard labor and just rewards. However, his drinking drove him to abandon his family, and my mother, who was only thirteen or fourteen at the time, became the "mother" of her family, overseeing her three siblings while her own mother went to work as a seamstress to support them. Forced to move in with their widowed grandfather, my mother bore the psychological scars of her father's rejection all of her life and was willing to make any sacrifice to see that her own children never faced life without the support and encouragement of two functioning parents in the home.

I share this story of my parents' lives for one reason. It seemed to me that my parents lived the creed that being poor or struggling was an advantage, not a handicap. I was never sure that they really believed that, but in many ways they communicated that belief to me as I was growing up and even after reaching adulthood. I have always believed that knowing where you come from and who you are can be a source of inner strength and ambition. And the world I heard about and knew as a boy was not exactly rosy.

When you listen to your forebears talk about the world of the 1930s Depression and eking out a hand-to-mouth living, you vicariously live parts of their lives and come to realize that you are truly on your own economically. That stark reality shaped my life on several levels. I did not lose my small savings in the bank failures of 1932 like my paternal grandfather, but I might as well have after listening to several soft-spoken conversations between my father and his father.

The central point here is that I was overtly and covertly taught that you and I are adrift in the economic seas. Through the focused application of all of our various personal resources, we have the opportunity and yes, the need, to chart our own course seeking financial independence at whatever level we can reach, in this onetime-only crapshoot called life. That does not mean money is our only life goal—far from it. Material wealth will not necessarily make us happy, but neither will poverty. If we view money as a tool to help us achieve something better, both materially and spiritually, then we may have found one key to successfully navigating life.

Remember that money is a tool and only a tool. How we use it is the question at hand. In the following pages, we will together explore my perspective on how to manage this tool successfully.

Before we leave this discussion, I want to share one final thought about the benefits of adversity. As young college students, my fraternity brothers and I often attended services at the First Methodist Church, as the minister was one of the best public speakers I had ever heard. To this day, I rank Frank Nessler as among the best. The following statement from one of his Sunday sermons was seared into my brain forever: "Remember, the same flame that melts butter, hardens steel." Needless to say, I got it and believe it with all my heart, then and today.

Lessons for your road to financial independence:

  Adversities—real, imagined, or inherited—can be an inspiration and a source of strength.

  The search for financial independence requires real work and determination.

Chapter Two

...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: iUniverse
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2012
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1462083560
• ISBN 13: 9781462083565
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 120
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: preigu GmbH & Co. KG; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; Niedersachsen; 49078; Deutschland