How We Prevent Wealth

How We Prevent Wealth: A Personal Finance Reflection, is a personal finance book that every young professional must read.

Its author reflects on why, after being in the work force for 12 years, he has not amassed the amount of net worth that he should have had, relative to his current lifetime earnings. Instead of being well within the net worth range proposed by Stanley and Danko, in their best-selling book, The Millionaire Next Door, he realized that he had made a series of detrimental, common financial mistakes that too often traps many young professionals into a world that is surround by debt and other financial stressors.

In How We Prevent Wealth: A Personal Finance Reflection, the author personalizes almost every chapter to bring a sense of reality, not theory, to how easily one may actually build wealth. He talks about how his own mistakes, such as his impulsive spending habits, multiple car purchases, disagreements with his spouse about money, ignorance of investing, long term mortgage payments, and among other things, getting caught in "the upgrade cycle," drastically minimized the amount of money that could have been used to add to purposeful, measurable, and realistic wealth building goals.

How We Prevent Wealth: A Personal Finance Reflection takes a critical look at:
•The author's personal relationship with money •How we find ourselves deeply in debt
•Why we never seem to have any money
•The renting vs buying a home concept
•A realistic and simple plan to retire in order to truly enjoy our golden years

Teaches:
•What a budget is and how to maintain it
•How to set effective financial goals; goals that are measurable, purposeful, and realistic
•How to get out of debt concepts
•How to save for retirement using a retirement income stream approach
•How to deal with a partner with different money valuesChallenges readers to: •Define what wealth means to them
•Qualitatively and quantitatively analyze how much to spend for college
•Leverage education, whether formal or informal
•Understand the fundamentals of investing prior to trying to beat the "experts"
•Master the basics of personal finance

The book's philosophy on how not to "prevent wealth" is simple and far from restrictive, and is as follows:
1. Define what wealth means to you.
2. Determine what needs to happen to bring wealth within your reach.
3. Set effective financial goals to meet your personal definition of wealth.
4. Reevaluate your goals as necessary.

"Determining what needs to happen to bring wealth within our reach", is the basis for How We Prevent Wealth: A Personal Finance Reflection. The earlier we make this determination, the wealthier we may become.