The Obvious Solution: Custom-Designed Financial Peace of Mind

By Ryan O'Donnell and Mike O'Donnell

The Obvious Solution addresses the 5 main concerns of the affluent (those with more than $1 million of investable assets) and lays out a process that a wealth manager should use to help you achieve financial peace of mind.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: May 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781631920646

Book preview

Authors

I. An Introduction to Wealth Management

A. Who This Book Is for and What It Can Help You Accomplish

If Custom-Designed Financial Peace of Mind is an obvious solution to a problem important enough to write a short book about, then you might rightly ask:

• What exactly is the problem that is being solved?

• Who benefits from the solution to the problem?

• What exactly is the solution, and why does it work?

• And finally, if the solution is so obvious, why isn’t it more widely applied?

Before we dive in and answer these questions, please consider the following:

Sometimes in life, the simplest things can make the biggest difference.

Unfortunately, regardless of how unhappy or dissatisfied we might be, we are unlikely to notice or become aware of those simple things—even if they are right in front of us—if we are saddled with years of history and inertia. Like it or not, none of us can know what we don’t know, and if we don’t know that different and better options exist, then at a certain point, we are likely to just stop looking for them.

The solution being presented in this book is not always easy to execute well. But it is in many respects a simple and obvious solution—one that really works—and can be stated as follows:

Affluent families can benefit tremendously from working with a true wealth manager, that is, an individual or firm that can provide you and your family not just with personalized investment solutions, but with a process that ensures that all of the financial and financial-related aspects of your life (e.g., investment planning, tax planning, estate planning, legal and insurance planning, and charitable gift planning), sync together and work as an intelligent whole.

We hope that by the time you have finished looking through this book, this simple and obvious solution will be so clear and will make so much sense that if it applies to your situation, you will take action and move forward in implementing it. (One way to move forward is to receive a free second opinion on your situation, which we’ll discuss in Chapter IV.) Our firm may or may not be the right match for you, but no doubt there is a perfect fit for you or you and your family out there. Ultimately, if this book motivates even one individual or family to move from dissatisfaction to satisfaction, from doubt to clarity, or from haphazard handling of the many elements of their financial and financial-related life to a comprehensively secure and content state of mind, then it will have accomplished its purpose.

But how can you tell, to begin with, whether the wealth management solution described here is appropriate for you and your family? First, the problems and solutions being explored here mainly apply to individuals and families that are fairly financially affluent, meaning those who have $1 million or more in investable liquid assets. If you are not (yet) in that economic category, you may still gain a lot of value from parts of this book, especially Chapter II, but also parts of Chapters III, IV, and V.

Second, as for whether the solution will likely benefit you and your family, ask