The Real Wealth Beyond Wall Street

By One with No Name

This is a true story of my roller-coaster ride to freedom and how I discovered the keys to real wealth.

For me, it was a spiritual journey as much as it was a financial one. I know it will be the same for you.

I hope that, in sharing my story, you will also find freedom using the ten keys I have outlined in this book.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Partridge Publishing Singapore
• Release date: Dec 14, 2016
• ISBN: 9781482881912

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

Catalysts for Change

Racing out of town as my life was crashing all around me, I drove as fast as I could to try and outdistance my troubles and leave my old life behind. The stock market had just crashed, and I was out of a job.

My whole life as I had known it had fallen apart. Instinctively, I headed to my only possession, a small condominium on the beach, and toward a future that was yet unknown. In my gut I knew, There has to be a better way! I knew that what I had been doing wasn’t working. I had followed the American dream and had found it sorely lacking. I had worked hard chasing the almighty dollar for over twenty years. I had made the Wall Street firms I worked for millions and millions of dollars. And I had provided a good home and prosperous lifestyle for my wife and family. But along the way, I had lost myself.

This was the start of a journey that would take me into the unknown—the place where all adventures unfold. Little did I know that where I was headed, a whole new life was waiting for me—the life that I yearned for inside. A life where I felt valued and loved, gifted and whole, where I experienced creativity and abundance and freedom beyond my wildest dreams.

In retrospect, having it all taken away was a very good thing. It jump started me into a completely different direction where I could find myself and my deepest values. What made me happy and fulfilled. Along the way, I established a new relationship with money so that money served me, instead of the other way around.

It was the unraveling of the American dream and the creation of the ultimate dream—true freedom—physically, emotionally, mentally, spiritually and financially. In the process, I moved from loss to abundance, from fear to love, from enslavement to freedom. This new path led me to the gold at the end of the rainbow where I found my place in the sun in a real life paradise.

Getting Out of the Maze

There’s a Greek legend about an endurance test in which an athlete must dive into an underwater maze, and isn’t able to come up unless he finds the right way out. Time is limited, of course, by how long he can hold his breath. False solutions present themselves at every turn, and some people die in their attempts to reach air. Once out, however, the initiate gets welcomed into the elite of Spartan society, and is now considered truly prepared for real spiritual advancement.

Marrying, starting a family, and joining the corporate world was a lot like that for me. I saw no other path to becoming the person I believed I was destined to be. Once in, I struggled for air, even as I became more and more determined to get the game right. When the pressure became unbearable, I would, at last, surface, but not in any way I ever expected.

I never imagined I would walk away from the family I loved and nurtured for so many years, into a path so far from what I was trained to envision—a path that led me into foreign countries, the huts of medicine people, the hands of shamans, to magicians of various stripes, and also to a few tricksters, including a large scorpion. This is the story of my journey to freedom.

On my father’s birthday, January 1st, 1987, I walk into my house and tell my wife I have to leave. I have no place to go, no plan, and no other arms to fall into. Walking away, I am alone, leaving ruins behind me. But I can breathe. I can breathe.

I sometimes wonder how I came to be where I am now. When I look back at my childhood for clues, I remember very little. Perhaps what I do remember is most important. One scene sticks with me, and has continued to haunt me throughout my life.

I’m a little boy sitting across from my mother at the dining room table. It’s about 6:00 PM at night, and we two are anxiously waiting for my father to come home from work. My father, a physician, arrives home from a long hard day at work. His steps are heavy, and he doesn’t look at us. My mother is smiling, but also looks nervous. I feel a bit queasy because I know what’s coming.

My father sits down and begins to complain. The meal isn’t right. He doesn’t like my mother’s tone of voice, or what she’s wearing. She looks frightened. When she pleads with him to stop, he threatens to prescribe her medication to quiet her down. I get that familiar knotty feeling in my stomach. I feel so sad. I want to make it all better for my mother.

I know how to divert my father’s attention. I stick thumbs in my ears and scrunch up all my fingers except my middle finger, shooting two birds into the air. He turns to me and I see such anger on his face that I run away from the table in terror. He follows me up the stairs and into my room, bellowing after me. When he reaches my room, all is dark, and I have no memories.

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I turned to sports as a way to escape the conflict of the house. I didn’t have many social skills, and my parents rarely had friends over. I think my father was jealous of the fact that my mother came from a wealthy family and didn’t want her to have much contact with them. Josh, my younger brother by a year and a half, hid in the house and read books most of the day. My dad wanted him to become a doctor. Instead, he joined an ashram and became a Sikh. During his twenties, Josh suffered from manic-depression and required a lot of psychiatric care. His illness drained the family, emotionally and financially. My father frequently said, Why don’t we just lock him up and throw away the key? I didn’t laugh. Later as adults, my brother and I developed a closeness and spiritual rapport we never had as kids.

All through my childhood, my father obsessed over money, and acted as though we were poor. For example, even though we could easily afford a dishwasher, he would wash the dishes himself. He got up on the roof in his undershirt trying to fix a leak even though he knew nothing about roofing, rather than call a professional. He rarely took us out to dinner, and when he did, he put a cap on what we could spend.

My father grew up poor—his parents owned a grocery store in South Philadelphia, and his mother pressured him to go to medical school to build a better life for himself. Though he was a physician, his personality and bedside manner apparently turned off his patients, because he was always struggling for new business, taking on outside work. Thinking about it now, I admire his creativity in how he managed to provide for our needs.

He took a job at Sidney Hillman Medical Center, serving employees of the garment industry. He would take us to his clients’ stores, and dress us up at a discount. In order that we might go to sleep-away camp, he got a job as the camp doctor, and my mom was the camp mom. Between patients, my dad would pick grapes and make wine out them. This raised a few eyebrows, and gave rise to the camp saying, Amidst the infirmary’s many worries, Dr. Golden is picking berries!

I went to an all-boy’s high school, and got mediocre grades. My father, an alumnus of the University of Pennsylvania, helped get me a scholarship to the Wharton School of Business. Around the time of graduation, I had a recurring dream in which I feared that after attending only 60% of the classes, I would go to final exams unprepared, flunk out and disappoint my father. In reality, I went to closer to 95% of the classes physically, but was mentally present only about 60% of the time. I still managed to pass.

After I graduated from Penn with an accounting major, I worked at accounting jobs in Philly for two years, then moved to New York, taking an accounting job with an accounting firm that specialized in auditing stock brokerage firms. In 1963, when I was scheduled to take my CPA exam, I headed to Queens for the World’s Fair instead. I never took the exam.

About two years into the job, I started to get bored. For fun, I would go to brokerage firms during my lunch hour and watch the ticker tape flash across the wall. After lunch, I returned to my accounting job, and would be looking at my watch, waiting for the day to end. If I don’t get out of this scene, I complained to myself, I’m going to end up doing this crap the rest of my life!

Inspired by that fear, I took out an ad in the Wall Street Journal, seeking a job as an assistant to a trader. I had zero experience in this field, and had heard you had to both come from money and have connections to break in. I had neither. It turned out not to matter. David Martin had just married into a family who owned a brokerage firm, and had gone to work for his father-in-law, and needed an assistant. He answered my ad and I went for an interview.

I arrived at his father-in-law’s firm, and walked into a small office. At one end was an open door onto a room with a long table, almost like a dining room table, with an old dishevelled guy at the head of it, who turned out to be the owner, Sam Cohen. Three people flanked him on each side of the table, and machines clicked and whirred and hummed on the sides of the room behind the seats. Sam Cohen’s head was buried in a huge book. His crooked mustard tie clashed with his green plaid shirt, and his hair looked as if he had just rolled out of bed.

David Martin, his son-in-law, looked more like a fashion model. He appeared a bit feminine, with chiselled features, European-looking clothes, and possibly a nose job. He took me into his office and asked me the usual interview questions for ten or twenty minutes. Then he said, I’d like to offer you this job.

It turned out that Sam Cohen had given his son-in-law several million dollars and carte blanche to manage it. Through risk arbitrage, David was creating wealth in the stock market by pre-emptively buying stock in lower priced companies about to be sold to higher-priced companies. By buying the stock in the lower priced company and selling it at the new, higher price that was being offered by the acquiring company, David took advantage of the differential, and also assumed the risks, primarily, that the deal wouldn’t go through.

This made careful analysis of the risks very important, which was where I came in. He would have me call the companies and research the deals, reporting on length of time the deal would take to complete, government, anti-trust and other related issues. He was very creative in finding ways to take advantage of these situations.

David also participated in the New York art scene, and the ballet center. These worlds were foreign to me, and only barely familiar to David. I watched his maneuverings in his new wealthy surroundings with interest.

I worked around the clock, ordering his dinner, picking up his dry cleaning, and even buying presents for his wife. In turn, he taught me every inch of the business, including how to use my creativity in the stock market, and how to think outside the box.

I wondered to myself at times whether this strenuous scenario was truly what I wanted. I knew I was grateful to be employed. Though at times I felt like David’s slave, I would have done anything for him.

Eventually, Sam got fed up with his extravagant son-in-law, who consistently outspent his allowance. He decided to pawn David off on someone else. He chose an elite firm that served the Kennedy’s and other prestigious families. When David got kicked across the block, he took me with him. There I was, this middle-class Jewish kid, in the midst of very well-heeled WASPs. I stuck out like a sore thumb. After a couple of months, one of David’s cohorts suggested that his son might be a better sidekick for him than me. David arranged for me to get another job.

He introduced me to Jacob and Company, a 250-employee firm who did similar work to David’s, plus more. I got interested in the additional activities, such as convertible securities, which included preferred stocks, bonds, warrants and options. A convertible security is a money product that can be converted into another money product, usually in the same company.

I became quite adept, and Jacob and Company noticed, and invited me to invest some of their money. I got good at trading convertible securities, and after about three years, had a staff of six. I and my staff were producing about a third of the firm’s profits.

Ten years down the road, the two major principles were aging, and Bedford Brothers bought them out. Bedford Brothers was 5,000 strong and twenty times as big as Jacob and Company. They had a convertible securities department comparable to mine. I was shocked to hear they wanted to fire their people and have me bring my staff on.

Swimming in this new ocean, I felt lost. It was cold and unfamiliar. Although I had prestige in my new position, and continued to excel at my work, these achievements felt hollow. More than ever, I ached for the family I never had. The feeling of the small firm was the closest resemblance to a family that I had up to that point. Until then, I hadn’t realized what I had in a smaller company—warmth, camaraderie, a feeling of belonging, close friendships and people around me who knew the details of my day-to-day life. I hadn’t realized how much these things sustained me.

I remember that ache for the feeling of family is what had drawn me to Margaret. I started dating Margaret after I met George in the Army. After college I was drafted into the Army in Philadelphia. I went to Fort Knox for six months, and hated every minute of it. I would pay people to clean the toilet when it was my turn. Mainly, I played cards. I met George near the beginning, and we became close friends.

After basic training, we each got an assignment. Mine was weighing duffel bags. I had a Renault convertible, and used to spend my days washing the car. It became a sort of meditative exercise that took me away from the reality of the Army. Once or twice a day someone would transfer in or out of our base, and need to have their duffel bag weighed, so I’d take the five minutes to perform this task and return to washing my car. I got so bored that I went into Lexington, Kentucky found a local accountant and began working for him during the time I was supposed to be on hand to weigh duffel bags.

At the end of my six-month contract, George and I and a couple of other guys piled into a Volkswagen bug and headed for Mexico. Our first stop was Tijuana. We stopped in a bar filled with Mexican women. They didn’t speak much English. At the door, a woman sold beads for about two dollars each. Once inside, we were greeted by Mexican women, plying their trade for beads with Fucky, sucky? This scenario didn’t appeal to me, but I waited while my friends explored what the situation had to offer.

Then we jumped back into the car and continued south, winding up in Acapulco. The rest of our time we spent deep sea fishing and hanging out. Then we jumped back into the car and continued south, winding up in Acapulco. The rest of our time we spent deep sea fishing and hanging out.

I saw that George was a sociable fellow, handy around the house, and a responsible roommate. He seemed sophisticated—he drew many women to him, and favored European women. I admired him, and in a way, I felt closer to him than I ever had to any other man.

One weekend a friend of mine, Don, and I took a break and visited a resort where we encountered a group of older women in their 40s. Don was having some luck entertaining these ladies, but once again, it wasn’t my cup of tea.

My programming was to love my mother unconditionally, to be her surrogate husband, and she in return praised me, told me how wonderful I was. After fifteen years of this heavy-duty job, from about age eight to twenty-three, I shifted my loyalties. In the midst of the 40-somethings was one young woman, Margaret. Our eyes met, and I recognized her as someone my age. We began talking and found a comfortable rhythm. Before I knew it, I had a girlfriend.

For some reason, it was important to me to have George’s approval, and dating Margaret seemed to be a way to do that. There were many other things that appealed to me about Margaret too, but few to do with our actual relationship. We lived near one another, so dating was convenient.

I met her family, and noticed they were very loving. Unlike my family, they actually talked to and listened to one another, and enjoyed each other’s company. They lived in a small apartment, didn’t have very much money, yet seemed rich in happiness. Margaret’s father had fled from Eastern Europe, and was studying to be a rabbi. Margaret was teaching elementary school. I could rely on Margaret, and could trust her with anything. She was cautious, some might also say fearful and rigid. Yet I was drawn to the happiness and security of her family.

We would see each other once or twice a week. We took in movies, meals out, the usual young adult activities. Sex was never part of the picture, as the No sex before marriage dictum that was popular in our culture at that time hung heavy in both our minds.

After two years of dating, Margaret began to ask me about a ring. She didn’t need anything fancy. So I got her a pearl ring, and we began to plan the wedding. Margaret’s father had very little money. He worked hard in the garment district with little to show for it.

My mother was not happy for us. Rather than Margaret getting welcomed into the fold, it became evident that there was no fold. My mother felt I had abandoned her. How could you marry into a family like that? my mother raged.

She demanded to invite lots of people to the wedding, friends and family that I had never even heard of. She would criticize Margaret and her family behind her back. Why, she wondered, would I abandon my family for this family?

On the day of the wedding, Margaret was very nervous, and even vomited just before she was about to walk down the aisle. After the ceremony, we went to Nassau, and it became apparent that we were on two different trips. Margaret suggested early on that we spend some time with other young married couples. I wasn’t interested at all. I wanted to rent a motor scooter and drive around the island. Margaret was too afraid. So I went around the island on a motor scooter by myself, and stopped at a bar and had a few drinks. When I returned to the hotel, it was my turn to vomit. Margaret got embarrassed and cleaned up after me. That was the beginning of our separate lives together.

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While I was climbing the ladder at Jacob and Company, I met Tom Weber, who worked on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Through many