Gregory Curtis - The Stewardship of Wealth, + Website: Successful Private Wealth Management for Investors and Their Advisors

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Cover Illustration: Elena Elisseva/iStockphoto.

Copyright 2013 by Gregory Curtis. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.

Published simultaneously in Canada.

This book is an updated and expanded edition of Creative Capital: Managing Private Wealth in a Complex World, by Gregory Curtis, copyright 2004 by Gregory Curtis, New York: iUniverse, Inc.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Curtis, Gregory, 1947

[Creative capital]

The stewardship of wealth : successful private wealth management for investors and their advisors / Gregory Curtis.

pages cm. (Wiley finance series)

This book is an updated and expanded edition of Creative Capital: Managing Private Wealth in a Complex World, by Gregory Curtis, copyright ? 2004 by Gregory Curtis, New York: iUniverse, Inc.Title page verso.

Includes index.

ISBN 978-1-118-32186-7 (hardback); ISBN 978-1-118-42015-7 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-43410-9 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-42163-5 (ebk)

1. InvestmentsUnited States. 2. WealthUnited States. 3. FinanceUnited States. I. Title.

HG4910.C87 2012

332.02401dc23

2012020170

Lege feliciter!

*Read happily! From the epigraph to An Ecclesiastical History of the English People, by The Venerable Bede, completed in 732. The book recorded events in Britain from the raids by Julius Caesar (55 B.C.) to the arrival in Kent of St. Augustine (597). Bede's practice of dating events from the time of Christ's birth (i.e., anno Domini or A.D.) caused that convention to come into general use. Unfortunately, the concept of zero was unknown at the time (Christ would have been age zero at birth, not age one), so Bede's dating system initially caused a great deal of mischief.

Preface

Nothing corrupts a man so deeply as writing a book.

Nero Wolfe

Over the years, thousands of investment books have been written. A precious few have become classics in the field, but the rest are long, and probably best, forgotten. Given this ponderous history, even the author himself must wonder whether he may be trying the patience of the reading public with yet another book on investing.

I plead this: I'm approaching the investment challenge from a different perspective than mostindeed, than virtually allof my predecessors. In the first place, I'm addressing a very special audiencewealthy investors and their advisors. In the second place, the purpose of most investment books is to make us better investors. But this book has a slightly but importantly different objective: to help significant investors to become better stewards of their assets, whether or not they ever become good investors in the professional sense of the word.

Finally, this book, and especially Part One, constitutes a cri de coeur for the importance of private capital in the American free market economysomething too many people, including too many wealthy people, fail to understand. The so-called 1 percentthat group of people whose wealth or earnings place them above 99 percent of the rest of the populationhas become a whipping boy for everything that is wrong with America.

There is certainly a lot wrong with America, and some of it involves the 1 percent. But in fact the top quartile of American society is as competitive as it has ever beenperhaps even more so. The bottom continues to struggle, as it always has, and needs help. What is new is that the middlethe great American middle classis now struggling as it has never done before.

Much of what ails the middle class has to do with the globalization of competitionAmericans who used to compete only with other Americans now must compete with Chinese, Indians, Brazilians, and so on, many of whom are far more cost competitive. But some of it is self-inflicted: The American middle class isn't prepared, educationally or by temperament, for the cutthroat world it now occupies. American public policy needs to focus on this issue, but speaking very broadly, if the middle class wants to regain its competitiveness globally, it could do a lot worse than to emulate the path taken by the 1 percent.

As noted later in this preface, good stewardship involves much more than investing capital soundly. It involves the ongoing growth and nourishment of a family's human capital in the broadest sense. And it involves the recognition that the responsible management and creative use of private wealth is crucial to the continued vitality of the American free market democracy. Families and their advisors need to view the challenge of stewardship in this broader sense.