Drawing on two decades of experience inside top Wall Street firms, Norb Vonnegut takes you inside the seamy underbelly of wealth management and reveals: How rogue brokers and financial advisers mismanage your money and screw you on hidden fees. Why it’s a mistake to rely on conflicted industry watchdogs for protection. What you can do to win during an era when identity thieves are one click away.
In The Dirty Little Secrets of Money, Norb Vonnegut teaches readers how to invest wisely and safeguard their money from financial predators whether they hail from Wall Street, the annuity-industrial complex, Silicon Valley, the dark web, radio and television airwaves, or between the sheets of the readers’ own beds. After sixteen years in the world of private wealth management, including ten years at Morgan Stanley, Vonnegut, the “most trusted name in financial malfeasance,” reveals his five-step playbook to protect your hard-earned money.
You can be scared by your money . . . Or you can “verify, then trust,” “think like a dynasty,” and “develop an anti-fraud plan,” which are just three of Vonnegut’s five steps to make good investment decisions and thwart financial predators, steps that he illustrates with industry facts, hard-hitting stories about real-life family situations, and specific recommendations that don’t require an MBA to put into place.
1. Will you outlive your money and go broke? Probably.
2. The US government estimates that high fee and commissions cost investors $17 billion per year in retirement savings. Are you one of them?
3. Did you know your financial adviser just required you to give up a constitutional right in order to manage your portfolio. Say what . . .?
4. At least 1.2 billion identities have already been compromised. The question is not if your identity will be stolen . . . The question is when cyber criminals will get around to “working” the goods they already have on you.
5. Did you attend one of those investment seminars that come with a free meal and buy an annuity from a salesperson who said it was safe, simple to understand, and promised, “You don’t pay me. I get paid from the profits of the company . . .” Uh oh.
6. Your grandmother’s retirement account is getting pillaged. Elder financial abuse clocks in with losses ballparked at $2.9 billion dollars a year.
You can win thanks to Vonnegut’s essential advice. You can keep hard-earned money safe for your family by embracing the five precepts in this defensive handbook, a must-read for new and seasoned investors alike. The Dirty Little Secrets of Money cuts through the intimidation and mystery surrounding high finance, giving readers the investment and wealth management secrets the world’s top financial advisers have kept to their clients and themselves.