Why People Fail Financially

Ivy League Wealth Secrets

What Are Your Chances of Success?

The Study of the 100 Men

The 100-man story is a widely used historical study that was complied by the Department of Health and Human Services that found that for every 100 people in the workforce, the following outcomes would exist at age 65:

• On average, roughly 16 out of 100 do not live to reach age 65.
• Sixty-six who do live to reach age 65 and have incomes at or below $20,000 annually forces them to become dependent on their children, government, or charity, or requires them to continue working in some capacity beyond age 65.
•  Fourteen will have income in excess of $30,000, giving them the ability to be financially independent. Unfortunately, $30,000 of their annual income does not provide a very substantial quality of life.
• Only four people have an income in excess of $50,000 annually, which make them both financially independent and successful. Some would argue that the number would have to be much larger than $50,000 annually in order to maintain the current standard of living of many individuals.

*Source: Social Security Administration, Office of Research and Statistics, April 2000.

Why is it that 96 out of 100 people studied with strong middle-class jobs and incomes throughout the course of their working careers failed to achieve any substantial financial security and success in retirement?

How can it be that only 4 percent of Americans will become financially successful in their retirement? Aren’t we the world’s wealthiest nation?

For many years, the response by the financial services community was simply that people fail to plan…or to save. We know that many of these people are planning, but unfortunately, may be working with advisors that don’t truly understand all of the moving parts of a successful plan. Why does it seem more difficult than ever to succeed financially, given the advancement in our technology and culture?

What’s the Problem?

We seem to have all of the ingredients for success, yet most people never fulfill the American Dream. Why is it that many of us come up shorter than we planned in our financial goals? We seem to have plenty of access to financial information. However, there seems to be little evidence of widespread knowledge in financial matters.  We are lacking in our overall fiscal literacy and financial awareness.

In studying this behavior for nearly 15 years, we found that people’s inability to save has two basic components. (1) The smaller part is the lack of personal discipline to save. Most people want to save. They just can’t seem to find the money. What’s left after the government, banks, automotive finance companies, and credit card companies get paid? (2) The bigger problem facing us is the general lack of fiscal literacy.

Many people have no access to their accounts without paying surrender charges or penalties. They’re deferring income into retirement plans, and prepaying mortgages while carrying nondeductible debt. Many people don’t even know how much they owe. They need to look it up. They use one credit card to pay for another bill, and postdated checks to pay for others.. Many people even resort to gambling or buying lottery tickets as their hope for financial security.

One Foot on the Gas and One on the Brakes?

Let’s take a look at how the average American drives down the Financial Road of Life. Picture someone driving down the highway with one foot on the gas and one on the breaks. He can’t figure out why the car won’t go any faster. He’s trying everything he can think of: buying new tires, adding high-grade motor oil, and putting a high-grade of gasoline into the vehicle in an attempt to get it to move faster down the road. It doesn’t make any sense. As an outsider, you probably want to shout, “Just take your foot off of the brake!”

Unless you have properly coordinated and integrated plans, you may be inadvertently doing the exact same thing with your financial plan. This is owing to a lack of understanding of how money works. This book is designed to teach you how to take your foot off the brakes!

You won’t know until you take stock of your current financial status with a financial checkup. Make sure to examine all the areas that you may be unnecessarily transferring money. You can then recapture that money, and put it to use for yourself. Next, you can identify more efficient ways to build and create new wealth.

I hope that after you read this book you will change how you think about money. I want you to understand not only how to purchase financial products, but also how to create efficiency with your money. Ivy League Wealth Secrets explores simple, yet effective methods of reducing and/or eliminating many of the common transfers of your wealth. The savings from these measures could be substantial.

The application of your new knowledge should create more options and offer additional financial opportunities for you. Most of us lack new ideas. We have become robotic in our routine financial dealings. We end up letting others control our money. We’ve been slowly and systematically defeated by banks, taxes, and the burdens of our personal consumer debts.

Your chances of substantially increasing your wealth will be based on your skill of creating situations, controlling your outcomes, and then profiting from them. We want to help change your life by teaching you how to establish your own financial decision process. This is not about finding better investments or cheating on your taxes. It is about making informed decisions.

You can live the life you’ve always dreamed about. You don’t need to live a life of clipping coupons, purchasing cheaper products, or adhering to a budget. Systematic wealth building is exactly the opposite. It is an empowered process that allows you to control the outcome.

Knowledge is power. You must use your knowledge to create your financial environment. Consider the cost of not knowing (or not acting) on something. Most people make their financial decisions with incomplete data. They operate somewhere between opinion and fact, between myth and reality. It will be up to you to identify what is opinion and what is fact in your own financial lives.

Pay It Forward? Hopefully you found the contents on this site useful. Our mission is to promote financial awareness and spread fiscal literacy throughout the world. Our goal is to enhance the lives of over 1M people this year. If you know if anyone else that could benefit from finding some money and eliminating unnecessary wealth transfers, please forward this page to a friend. Remember, if you’re not part of the solution, you might be part of the problem. Thank you in advance for your support and your help in spreading our message.