Late Bloomer Wealth

Fast Facts

Fast Facts about “Late Bloomer Millionaires”

What is your book about?

Our story about how we retired early, pre­sented as a case study of how a couple of regular investors fought long and hard to learn the investing process by read­ing and study­ing while con­fronting head-on two of the biggest stock mar­ket crashes in his­tory and still able to retir­e early with a comfortable nest egg.

Started in our mid to late 30s with lit­tle money:

  • We made gut-wrenching mis­takes, includ­ing invest­ing in annu­ities and over invest­ing in tech sec­tor stocks.
  • We made a mil­lion $ by 2000 in the tech sec­tor, and then lost it as the tech bub­ble popped!
  • We show in vivid detail our mis­takes in thought and action.
  • With­out blam­ing or grous­ing, we stayed in the mar­ket long-term with com­mit­ment to each other and learn­ing new ways to man­age our finances.
  • By the time the Hous­ing Bub­ble and Reces­sion hit in 2008, we had imple­mented our plan and regained the Mil­lion $ we had pre­vi­ously lost.

Why did you write the book? What inspired you to write it?

THREE rea­sons:

  1. To help improve the retire­ment plan­ning cir­cum­stances and out­comes of edu­ca­tors, women, LGBT, boomers and late starters (Young peo­ple will ben­e­fit too).
  2. To show that tak­ing respon­si­bil­ity for retire­ment plan­ning is not so scary or as dan­ger­ous as Wall Street bro­kers and the annu­ity sales force would like you to believe.
  3. To write a book that is encour­ag­ing, fun and useful.

Who is your audi­ence? Who did you write the book for?

For Mil­lions of peo­ple who are reluc­tant or too scared to get seri­ous about retire­ment planning.

  • Of course, late starters, like our­selves, and Boomers, or even ear­lier starters who start prudently,
  • Women tend to think long-term and tend to buy and hold their investments, so we feel our story will res­onate with them,
  • The gay and les­bian com­mu­nity may find in our jour­ney role mod­els for mak­ing a shared effort to save for the long haul,
  • Edu­ca­tors like us who may not even real­ize they’ve been blind­sided by insur­ance prod­ucts with buried fees in their con­tracts that reduce their monthly retire­ment income,
  • Finally, oth­ers who find the bulk of invest­ment books are too tech­ni­cal and intimidating.

What is dif­fer­ent about your book com­pared to so many other invest­ment books? What is your con­tri­bu­tion to the per­sonal finance literature?

OMG! PLENTY!

  • Many of the exist­ing books are dry, humor­less, and lack a per­sonal con­nec­tion with the reader; they are about data. Part 1 shows our con­nec­tion to the reader in terms of grow­ing up in a mod­est back­ground, the first to go to col­lege, liv­ing within our means, small fam­ily home with an out­house or one bathroom.
  • Our case-study method­ol­ogy is this couple’s story: a cou­ple who planned together, lost a mil­lion dol­lars in one bub­ble and made it back in time to retire comfortably. We show the reader how we did it. We know that the reader will get more out of this book than oth­ers because our auto­matic con­nec­tion as reg­u­lar folks try­ing to make sense of the finan­cial infor­ma­tion every­where. We believe we identify with readers than the authors of the pro­fes­sion­ally writ­ten books.

What makes you an author­ity (exper­tise, qual­i­fi­ca­tions, and cer­ti­fi­ca­tions) to write a book on a sub­ject you never even for­mally studied?

  • Our expe­ri­ence with the “author­i­ties” was that we were deceived, even with our writ­ten per­mis­sion. We real­ized those let­ters behind a name, and the rat­ings of insur­ance com­pa­nies and TV ana­lysts don’t nec­es­sar­ily know what is essen­tial for an invest­ment plan. They are there to make money for them­selves, to sell some­thing to us. That is NOT an author­ity, it’s a sales job. A gen­uine author­ity is a fee-only fidu­ciary finan­cial advisor.
  • Our qual­i­fi­ca­tions come from hands-on expe­ri­ence, which taught us to avoid those self-serving author­i­ties and take respon­si­bil­ity for our own learn­ing and invest­ing. We already made money, now we’re shar­ing how!
  • We show our exper­tise in our doc­u­mented jour­ney, nav­i­gat­ing booms and busts. We learned from a great group of invest­ment authors.

How is your book sim­i­lar to the invest­ment books now available?

Many books dis­cuss the index­ing or pas­sive strat­egy and phi­los­o­phy. Our book sup­ports and val­i­dates the build­ing blocks that help make those strate­gies work:

  • long-term think­ing (buy and hold),
  • diverse invest­ments in equi­ties and bonds,
  • con­trol­ling costs and iden­ti­fy­ing hid­den costs,
  • asset allo­ca­tion among the major asset classes,
  • under­stand­ing risk, with­out tech­ni­cal jargon, and
  • using basic math, no secrets, just lots of good ideas!

 

 

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