westland ltd.
13 Steps to Bloody Good Wealth
Ashwin Sanghi ranks among Indias highest-selling authors of English fiction. He has written several bestsellers ( The Rozabal Line, Chanakyas Chant, The Krishna Key, The Sialkot Saga ) and a New York Times bestselling crime thriller called Private India together with James Patterson. Sanghi has also penned a non-fiction title, 13 Steps to Bloody Good Luck . He was included by Forbes India in their Celebrity 100 and is a winner of the Crossword Popular Choice award. He was educated at Cathedral & John Connon School, Mumbai, and St Xaviers College, Mumbai. He holds a Masters degree in business management from Yale University. Ashwin Sanghi lives in Mumbai with his wife, Anushika, and his son, Raghuvir.
You can connect with Sanghi via the following channels:
Website: www.sanghi.in
Facebook: www.facebook.com/shawnhaigins
Twitter: www.twitter.com/ashwinsanghi
YouTube: www.youtube.com/user/ashwinsanghi
Instagram: instagram.com/ashwin.sanghi
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/ashwinsanghi
Sunil Dalal is a serial entrepreneur. He has built multiple global technology businesses since taking over and redirecting UniDEL, a family-owned industrial automation group with worldwide alliances. Sunil is a member of the Young Presidents Organisation and is keen on nurturing entrepreneurial talent. He holds a Bachelors degree in Mechanical Engineering & Management of Technology from Vanderbilt University, USA.
2008 was a defining year for many families as they lost their hard earned money in a bubble not of their making, but propelled by irrational exuberance and excessive leverage in the capital markets. Sunil saw certain investments collapse to as much as fifty per cent of their original value; some to even zero per cent. He knew then that he had to do something. Luck presented itself when his group couldnt find the appropriate technology to automate their private investment management through their family office. And thats when they were galvanised into action. They corralled all the knowhow across their family office and technology businesses to build Asset Vantage ( www.assetvantage.com ), a unique software platform for wealth owners. Along the way they discovered that their solution was also a great fit for accounting firms, wealth advisors and institutions that want to harness the power of the platform to achieve optimal customer participation in developing customised financial strategies and plans.
You can connect with Sunil via the following channels:
Website: www.unidel-group.com/management/
Facebook: www.facebook.com/sunilkishoredalal/
Twitter: twitter.com/sunil_k_dalal
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/sunilkdalal
ASHWIN SANGHI
SUNIL DALAL
westland ltd
61, II Floor, Silverline Building, Alapakkam Main Road, Maduravoyal, Chennai 600095
93, I Floor, Shamlal Road, Daryaganj, New Delhi 110002
First published by westland ltd, 2016
First e-pub edition: 2016
Copyright Ashwin Sanghi 2016
All rights reserved
978-93-85152-77-1
Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks (P) Ltd.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, circulated, and no reproduction in any form, in whole or in part (except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews) may be made without written permission of the publishers.
Contents
After I wrote 13 Steps to Bloody Good Luck in 2014, I was inundated by readers emails, tweets, Facebook posts and letters telling me that the book had helped them navigate their lives and careers. But one particular email drew my attention more than the others. The sender was a student who wondered whether it was possible to provide 13 Step solutions to most of lifes challenges. It got me thinking.
A few days later I was chatting with my friend, Sunil Dalal. Sunil and I have known each other from our days at Cathedral & John Connon School and St. Xaviers College, Mumbai. I have observed the discipline and perseverance with which he has worked towards building his familys fortunes. I gently put forth the idea that he write a book outlining the 13 Steps to wealth creation.
Why me? asked Sunil. I am neither a banker nor a Chartered Accountant. I have never managed a mutual fund or a financial services company. I dont even have an MBA in Finance!
Those are precisely the reasons why you should write this book, I said to him. Any fool can make something simple sound complicated. It takes talent to make something complex sound simple. Thats what you can do!
It took a little more cajoling before I could get Sunils acquiescence and he agreed to do it only after I consented to co-author the book with him. Im glad that I persisted. Sunil has spent decades managing and growing wealth without being part of the banking and finance ecosystem. This makes him neutral to financial products and investment options. Who better to offer impartial advice?
The motivational speaker, Zig Ziglar, once joked Money isnt the most important thing in life, but its reasonably close to oxygen on the gotta-have-it scale. Given the undeniable fact that it forms a central part of our lives, I am delighted to present 13 Steps to Bloody Good Wealth to my readers because I believe that Sunil has succeeded in distilling a lifetime of learning into 13 simple steps that almost anyone can follow.
Ashwin Sanghi
Mumbai, 2016
What gives me the right to write a book about wealth? Im not a banker, I dont have an MBA, nor have I ever worked in the financial services industry. But I indeed have been on the other side of the door as a consumer.
All of us have seen those lofty bank advertisements that make us feel as if the banks are right by our side, helping us through every phase of our lives. The reality could not be further away from the truth. The simple truth is that all those banks have great ad agencies.
I am reminded of my nightmarish dealings with some of these banks, which are household names, when they were apparently helping me manage my money. What they actually did was pull a fast one on me. One bank skimmed 1% off a foreign exchange transaction when it should have been 0.05%. Another made me run from pillar to post to three branches to get a simple direct debit cell phone connection completed. A third lost 25% of my equity portfolio due to a badly-conceived investment strategy.
The American cartoonist, Kin Hubbard, is believed to have once commented that the safe way to double ones money is simply to fold it over once and put it inside your pocket! Possibly Hubbard had dealt with financial institutions!
Im narrating these incidents because Im sure you have been at the receiving end of such situations too. Whether it is being sold the wrong product, charged extra fees, or not having your queries answered, all of us have suffered at the hands of these faceless bureaucracies. It boils down to a massive industry structural problem where the banks and their employees are often financially incentivised in ways that are fundamentally not in the consumers best interest.
These establishments often take advantage of our ignorance, sometimes knowingly and sometimes due to their sheer bureaucracy. During my troublesome interactions with them, I learned some real life lessons, which I feel need to be shared. If you can benefit from my experience, it will hopefully make your learning faster and easier.
