Taylor - The financial rules for new college graduates: invest before paying off debt and other tips your professors didnt teach you

The Financial Rules for New College Graduates

Invest before Paying Off Debtand Other Tips Your Professors Didnt Teach You

Michael C. Taylor

Copyright 2018 by Michael C. Taylor

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Control Number: 2017056898

ISBN: 978-1-4408-6105-5 (print)

978-1-4408-6106-2 (ebook)

222120191812345

This book is also available as an eBook.

Praeger

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This book is printed on acid-free paper

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Contents

PART 1

Whats Stopping You from Achieving Wealth?

CHAPTER ONE

You Should Be Wealthy

You Should Be Wealthy

But, like 99% of us, you dont feel wealthy.

You can become wealthy, but you do not even know where to begin.

Even for those of us living in the wealthiest era in human history, even for those of us born by accident into one of the richest countries in the world, even so, the vast majority of us do not feel wealthy.

We see wealthy people as some other group, perhaps the athlete interviewed on ESPN after the game, or the actress in the sparkly gown receiving her second Academy Award on the stage, or those tech start-up guys announcing a strategic partnership with Google at the press conference. But many of us doubt that we could be part of the group of wealthy people.

Believe me, you can be wealthy.

The ideas here willprovided youre young, disciplined, and embrace the ideas in this book fullymake you wealthy over your lifetime.

Another Book about Getting Wealthy?

Yes, this is another book about getting wealthy.

Youre skeptical . Skeptical is good. In fact, its one of the three key traits for building wealth.

But before you turn too skeptical on me, let me give you a sneak-peek into another of the three key traits of wealthy people that youll need to embrace to become wealthy: optimism .

Because if you dont have optimism, if you think becoming wealthy is something not for you, if you think to yourself some few people get wealthy, but 99% of us dont, and theres just nothing new to say, well then, youre already defeated. You should just put this book down, keep the purchase money in your thin wallet, and let some other damned fool try it.

Or, I recommend a better choice: conserve your optimism for a little while longer and just read to the end of the chapter.

So yes, this is another book about getting wealthy. Modestly speaking, this wisdom has been said elsewhere. Where I think I can improve on that wisdom is with simple explanations of concepts that previously might have seemed difficult, but arent; and with three main principles of thinking like a wealthy person woven into 21 thematic chapters, in a way you can use them.

Why Does Personal Finance Seem So Complicated?

We could choose to blame our parents and teachers and professors, who in an ideal world should have been able to teach us what we need to know, starting around junior high, with follow-up ideas every year.

I personally find our parents and teachers innocent of this fiasco. Most parents and teachers know just as little as we know about the path to wealth.

If you had a wealthy parenta parent who knew how to teach you this stuffyou might not need to read this book. Also, incidentally, your first millions would come to you tax free! But well get to that in the chapter on taxes, .

So no, please do not blame the adults in your life.

So Who Can We Blame?

I personally blame financial media.

The majority of what we see on television, hear on radio, and read online about finance amounts to nonsensical babble and sales pitches. These do not help us get wealthy. In factin total and on balancethey keep us poor.

For the moment, I will spare you my full-on financial-media rant. But Ill only delay my rant until . We need to understand and properly filter financial media better because its one of the keys to building wealth.

What I Want You to Learn from This Book, More Than Anything Else

For a smart person like you, personal finance is not complicated.

I can teach you how to think like a wealthy person.

With the right knowledge and attitude, you can be wealthy in your lifetime.

Each chapter of this book provides unique insight into a major personal financial topic, which might otherwise take decades to understand. A few highlights include:

• The three attitudes of wealthy people that you must adopt if you would like to be wealthy ().
• Advice on how to understand financial media, and most importantly why you need to ignore most of it ().
• The most powerful math formula in the known universe , taught and explained in a way so that you can use it yourself ().
• The evil algebraic inverse twin of that math formula, which underpins all fundamental investing ().
• Why investing for retirement before paying off student loans makes sense ().
• An explanation that there are really only two kinds of investments in the world , and how to figure out which of those two will work best for you in the long run ().
• The entire trillion-dollar personal investment industry sliced, diced, sauted, and reduced to the only two sentences that youll ever need in order to invest your money correctly ().
• The single question you must always ask before purchasing any kind of insurance ().
• A totally free estate-planning tool you can use to pass on tax-free wealth to your heirs (however undeserving those heirs may be) ().
• The single best definition of wealthy youll ever read ().

The mission of this book is to show how specific (and simple! ) choices you make, especially in the years after college, can guarantee you long-term wealth.

At the end of this book, if you embrace the ideas, you will know everything you need to know to be wealthy. I dont mean everything you could know, and I dont mean everything you might want to know, but rather everything you need to know to be wealthy. You will know this better than the athlete on ESPN, the actress at the Academy Awards, or the executives at the Google press conference. I promise you.

Everything you need to know about personal finance, at the end of the day, is simple.

Notice I didnt say easy , because its not all easy to do. Unlike that Mega Abdominal-Cruncher available on late-night television (for just $24.99!), this isnt an easy-peasy 6 minutes a day cure-all to become the abdominal-flexing Charles Atlas of personal finance by next week.

Dont let me mislead you. The doing part, the actual daily and monthly and yearly choices to apply the attitudes of wealthy people to the simple principles throughout the rest of the book? Thats hard.

If it were easy we would all already be wealthy. If it were easy , 55% of Americans with credit cards would not be carrying a balance month to month, undermining any chance they have of accumulating wealth. If it were easy , just 1% of Americans would not control one-third of the wealth in the country. If it were easy , the great majority of people would be wealthy. But we are not.