Bottom-Up Wealth

By Marissa Greco-Reale

Anyone can become wealthy, but not everyone can maintain wealth. The world is full of people who have earned millions of dollars but have nothing to show for it. The real question is, how do you hold on to your money and continue to grow it to be there when you need it?

Wealth is much more than simply earning a significant income. It is created through strategies and behaviors that must be repeated year after year. If you want to build true, sustainable wealth, then you need a clear roadmap to show you the way. Unfortunately, there is a serious lack of formal education about financial planning in the marketplace, leaving people confused and overwhelmed.

As a Licensed Financial Planner who manages hundreds of millions of dollars in assets for my clients, I can say with full confidence that with the right attitude and discipline, you can build generational wealth, even if you're starting at the bottom.

By the end of this book, you will not only have the information and tools you need to get started building true wealth, but you'll also have a concrete plan to keep you on track in your financial journey.

You deserve a life of abundance and the ability to spend your time how you want and with whom you want. Having wealth provides these options. Open this book and get started on your path to financial freedom today!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Marissa Greco-Reale
• Release date: Aug 31, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201685119

Book preview

Chapter 1:

Choosing Financial Freedom

T

o understand where I am in my financial life today and how I built my wealth, you must understand where I came from and the values by which I was raised. My father spent most of his early years growing up on a 25-acre farm in San Gregorio d'Ippona, Catanzaro, Italy. This is where he and my grandparents originally learned how to farm and live off the land they owned. Much of their time was spent tending the garden, growing tomatoes, beans, escarole, potatoes, peppers, olives, and spices. Although he has fond memories of being outdoors and roaming around on the farm, his family endured many financial hardships.

Their only available food was the produce they harvested, and the only source of income was the homemade olive oil they sold. They would walk their mule and a wagon one mile downhill to a natural fountain to fetch fresh water for their family and animals, multiple times every day. And, of course, they then had to travel that same distance back up the hill with a much heavier load. Meat was scarce, and occasionally they would eat a chicken from their farm. It was a true treat and only reserved for special occasions. Otherwise, their livestock were raised to provide eggs, milk, and protein.

One story my grandfather tells often is about a tradition in their town where each year around Christmas it was common courtesy to bring your priest a gift. One year my grandfather was asked by his dad to bring the priest a rooster. While that was my grandfather’s intention, he was so hungry that he kept the rooster to relieve his own family’s intense hunger. He then told his father that a fox killed the rooster and that he decided to cook the remaining carcass for the family, as it was unfit for the priest. By no means did my grandfather take lying lightly, but in their state of poverty, providing food for the family was a difficult reality.

There were not many job opportunities in the region at that time. Thus, my grandfather, with an elementary school education, maintained the farm and sold what they could harvest, particularly olive oil. When my father turned four years old in 1964, my grandparents decided that merely surviving day to day on the farm was no way to live. They made a family decision to move to America in pursuit of a better life. Traveling with little more than the clothes on their backs and $1,000, they set out on their journey. My grandfather hoped to find a new job quickly to reestablish his family. They found themselves in Raritan, New Jersey where my grandfather worked multiple shifts each day in restaurants and on farms to provide for my father, and eventually his two sisters. He was relentless in achieving his goal of financial independence and to offer his children the life he never had.

Meanwhile, as my grandfather set out to create a new life, my father quickly adapted to America and learned English within a few months. He remembers learning the concept of money at the young age of ten. He understood how important it was, and that his family did not have any. He played basketball often, and most of his friends wore Converse sneakers. He asked my grandfather for a pair, but he couldn’t afford them. Ever determined, my dad worked all summer delivering newspapers to buy one pair of Converse shoes for ten dollars.

My father started from the bottom and worked his way up, much like his father. From buying his first pair of Converse at age ten, to attending college at Susquehanna University at age eighteen, he slowly but surely began living the American Dream. After graduation, he worked his way up the corporate ladder in his early adult years and became a Certified Public Accountant (CPA). He believed that by becoming a CPA and working corporately, he could help others realize that vision he internalized at ten years old - that anyone can achieve and maintain wealth, even a ten-year-old boy with not a penny to his name. After working in the accounting profession for a few years, my father realized that simply helping people with their taxes was not going to be enough to fulfill his vision of success.

Thus, in addition to already being a CPA, he studied for hundreds of hours to become a Certified Financial Planner (CFP). Eventually, he established his own financial planning firm to help people not only create goals, but also attain those goals by using cash-flow modeling, risk management, investment planning, legal planning, and tax planning as well. Specifically, he would develop financial plans for clients, which is a step-by-step roadmap to achieving financial independence. Thirty-seven years later, he continues to have a strong desire to help people create, manage, and sustain wealth. He is a true testament that anyone can find the path to financial success, no matter their socioeconomic background. However, a key factor in his success was consistency and a desire to make it happen. This is the true secret to all success!

People often believe that achieving financial freedom is simple. A common misconception is that if you do something once, your goals can be reached. Of course, that’s never the case. Consistency is always key, and there are various measures of success in order to attain your financial goals, and ultimately, financial freedom.

The truth is wealth building is a marathon, not a sprint. Our brains are not wired to think long term. Why? There are too many unknowns about the future, so our brains shelter us from the potential outcomes. We are designed to think about the short term: What am I going to wear today? What will I eat for dinner tomorrow? Where will I vacation this year?

We crave instant gratification. We want everything yesterday. This doesn’t work in congruence with treating your finances more like a marathon rather than short sprints. Saving, budgeting, and creating wealth requires delayed gratification that most people aren’t willing to endure. And because we think we have so much time and aren’t getting immediate satisfaction, it’s easy to put off saving money, yet another day.

Then one day you wake up, suddenly fifty years old with limited savings, and the panic sets in. Excuses are nothing more than a mental block we create for ourselves. Excuses are not real, but they have REAL consequences. Excuses don’t produce results. Action does. So, which do you want - excuses or results?

Financial success doesn't happen by accident. The difference between people who are wealthy and those who are not, is not just some wild roll of the dice. There are consistent, logical patterns to excellence that are available to us all. We can unleash an infinite amount of wealth. We simply have to get ourselves in a state where we can strategically take action toward our financial dreams. The information to transform your financial life is no secret at all. It’s truly available to everyone. The answers can be found on Google, in books - specifically this book - but then why are only 8% of Americans millionaires? Because information is not enough. If all we needed was positive thinking and information, we all would have had ponies when we were kids, and each of us would be living our dream life now. Action is what separates the haves from the have-nots. Action gets results. Knowledge is only potential until it’s activated.

Even though becoming a millionaire might seem out of reach, this is an attainable result regardless of your income, skill set, stage of life, socioeconomic background, or race. But you must keep your eye on the prize and find a driving vision or purpose that makes you want to take action every day. It must be about more than just money. It has to be about the horizon ahead of you, and that horizon must always rise a little higher than the day before.

Anyone can get rich, but can you stay rich?

It should be noted that I do believe financial freedom can be harder to attain for those who have had bad experiences with money, coming from legitimate scarcity and poverty during their childhood. It can be terrifying for children not to have a guaranteed next meal, to watch their parents struggle to pay bills, or to get made fun of over worn-out clothing and hand-me-downs.

These experiences, left untreated, can have detrimental effects and can lead to the mishandling of money due to belief systems. The bottom line is your thoughts, feelings, and beliefs affect the way you perceive money. Especially how you earn and keep it!

The good news is these traumas are treatable and can be overcome by those who want to unburden themselves from their past. And this is why, again and again, you see the rags-to-riches stories all over the internet. You are capable of overcoming your past and finding ways of making money that fulfill your deepest desires.

This is a consistent theme I have seen from working with millionaires as a Licensed Financial Advisor since 2015. You do not have to come from a rich family or have a high corporate position to become rich. Not having some of these luxuries can actually be a true motivator to change your current financial situation.

Anyone has the potential to become rich, but not everyone can stay rich. The real question is: How can you stay rich over your lifetime? Wealth is much more than earning money. Wealth is a combination of learned strategies and behaviors that must be repeated year after year to maintain the flow of money into your bank account. This is the difference between becoming rich and being rich. What does being rich really mean? At the core, it means being able to do what you want, when you want, with whom you want for as long as you want. The intrinsic value that comes from being wealthy is the freedom to do exactly what you want with your time.

In order to get back your time, you will have to commit to doing whatever it takes right now to reach financial freedom. There is no half-in, half-out. There is no set-it-and-forget-it strategy. We face financial choices each day that can mean the difference between retiring when you want or having to work when you’re seventy-five years old. That can be the difference between living life on your own terms or being constrained by your financial capacity. That can mean enjoying your life with family and traveling the world or living within the same four walls forever.

Take Sally, who did not budget or save until her fiftieth birthday. She thought she should finally start getting serious about retirement planning and putting money away for when she would no longer have an income. Saving was never a priority for her because she thought she would work for the rest of her life. Unfortunately, Sally was confronted with an unexpected chronic illness and realized she would not be able to keep working through her retirement years. Frantic, she called me to schedule a meeting. After a series of conversations and working through her current financial situation, she quickly realized that she was not going to have enough