Sandeep Ghosh - Waking Up to Wealth

Having spent some years working in wealth management and planning, I write this book out of both passion and frustration. It is the frustration of seeing people with tremendous financial potential graze through life, wasting opportunities, oblivious to the time bomb that awaits later. The ominous outcome fuels my passion to add to the already numerous wake-up calls across the financial media and politics. Our responsibility for our personal finance is just that a responsibility to oneself, ones loved ones and to society in general. It is the backbone of the progress civilisation has witnessed so far. However, equilibrium in global wealth and end of poverty, that level playing field transcending nations and races, can only ever start where the value of money and its usefulness in society is properly understood. Starting in our very homes, we can do our bit to ensure the burden of our financial security doesnt eventually fall on others. Involving ourselves economically in a healthy way, be it with investment or debt, will only help relieve societal scarcity and will prompt the distribution of wealth to the corners where it is needed, raising our own standards of living, and in doing so, allowing those less fortunate the chance to lift their own communities out of hardship. However emotive and utopic a subject this may be, this book is very much focused on us as individuals and how and why we should wake up to the idea of taking full monetary control of our lives. It all starts with you.

Whatever your occupation, nationality or social status, the principals of financial planning and wealth management remain constant, unaltered by culture, race, religion or career. If youre part of a society where lifes needs come at a cost, youll require financial planning. Ive been managing wealth in and from the Middle East now for several years, advising individuals from middle management right through to business magnates, creating portfolios that run into the many millions of dollars, but my style and pattern of providing the advice rarely changes. Of course, for an industrialist worth many millions, there may be wider considerations and many more options available than for a lower income earner, but the framework and elementary design of a financial roadmap stays the same. Why? The reason is because the size of your assets is secondary to your age, your health, your liabilities and your objectives, ergo the human life cycle. It is upon this frame that we then add the clay to design and tweak the desired solution. So, this book, although mainly dealing with basics, will enable readers regardless of their present status to understand the key guidelines for wealth management and asset preservation. I do however make an assumption that, although you have a general idea of how personal finance and investing works, you havent yet taken a structured approach or are lost in the process. I also make the assumption that youre on your own in this journey (including a partner or spouse if applicable), without external dependence on parents or the like. Being a male adviser myself, I have often slipped into the masculine third-person singular pronoun to save time and space. At the same time, I may refer to financial planning as personal finance in some areas, and adviser as consultant. There are certain subjects which have overlapped or are referenced in more than one chapter, which is due to the very nature of the industry, where all elements are interconnected.