Close Your Wealth Gap: Financial Lessons to Upgrade Your Life

By Rob Luna

Simple and accessible strategies to build personal wealth and improve your life

In Close Your Wealth Gap: Financial Lessons to Upgrade Your Life, veteran wealth manager Rob Luna delivers a collection of actionable lessons you can implement immediately to ensure you make the most of the money you make and retire comfortably. You’ll learn everything you need to know about generating personal wealth, from how to understand balance sheets and cash flow statements to constructing a personal portfolio that effectively balances risk and potential reward.

The author explains the basics of maximizing your income with side hustles and passive income while, at the same time, increasing the impact of every dollar you earn. You’ll also find:

• Action plans for every stage of your life, including ways to prepare your children for a lifetime of financial independence and security
• Explanations of the difference between qualified and non-qualified accounts
• Strategies for avoiding “bad debt” while intelligently incurring—when necessary—good debt

Perfect for young professionals, people with new families, and anyone else with a desire to live well and retire rich, Close Your Wealth Gap is an indispensable recipe for financial security that belongs on the bookshelves of people everywhere.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wiley
• Release date: Sep 26, 2023
• ISBN: 9781394195619

Book preview

Close Your Wealth Gap!

Financial Lessons to Upgrade Your Life

Rob Luna

Logo: Wiley

Copyright © 2024 by Rob Luna. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.

Published simultaneously in Canada.

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Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data is Available:

ISBN 9781394195602 (Hardback)

ISBN 9781394195626 (ePDF)

ISBN 9781394195619 (ePub)

COVER DESIGN: PAUL MCCARTHY

I dedicate this book to everyone who is trying to improve their life and the lives of their families. Education is the greatest equalizer I know. Please use this information to take action.

Acknowledgments

All glory to God because through Him all things are possible.

I want to thank my wife Sabina, who is always my biggest fan. Thank you for helping me balance my passion about business and investing with my blood pressure levels. Your love and support mean everything to me. I couldn’t imagine my life without you. #Godsplan

To my daughter Bella, I am so proud of the young woman you are becoming. Your wisdom is beyond your years. I look forward to watching all the greatness that lies ahead of you. You are such an incredible person. I am very blessed to have you in my life.

I want to thank my business partner Luis Galdamez for all the hours helping me gather and proof check all the data that is used in the book and on the book’s site. You are not only a great business partner, but you are also an amazing friend! I couldn’t have met my deadlines without you!

To Charles Payne, thanks for allowing me uncensored access to your audience each week. You inspire me both professionally and personally. I share your relentless commitment to help people get their own slice of the American dream, no matter how hard people try to keep it from them. You are an absolute legend.

To Kenny Polcari, the first time I saw you on TV as a 20‐year‐old Wall Street rookie, I said, That is exactly who I want to be when I grow up, and today we are friends. Such a small world. You are a rockstar!

To Neil Cavuto, after the first time I appeared on your show, a handwritten card showed up at my office from you thanking me for being on the show. I was shocked you even knew my name, let alone took the time to write me. Your humility is what makes you so great in my eyes and is a lesson to us all to check your ego at the door. Thank you.

To Professor Jeremy Siegel, thank you for inspiring my passion for financial markets. What that inspiration has done for me and my family is more than you will ever know.

To Tim Grover, you are a beast. You are consistent, authentic, and one of the few people I chase daily. From the moment we were introduced, I knew I still had a long way to go. I strive to perform at your level one day.

Finally, to everyone who purchased this book. Thank you for helping me continue to live my dream. I wasn’t supposed to be here. God is good.

Introduction

Warning: this book is going to provide you with a plain‐English and very specific financial roadmap that will show you how to significantly improve your life. The problem is that this knowledge will shatter any excuses you had up to this point, cause you to act more strategically, and force you to deploy discipline into every aspect of your financial life. Furthermore, once you see how easy it is, you will want to kick yourself hard for not learning and implementing this stuff sooner! With all that said, I think you can handle it, and I can't wait to hear your success story.

What Is Financial Literacy?

Financial literacy is a major buzz word that grabs a lot of attention these days. If you ask five different people what it means to them, you will probably get five different answers. For the purposes of this book, we are going to define financial literacy in this way:

Financial literacy is gaining and/or accessing the knowledge that is required to optimize all the financial decisions you will need to make during your lifetime. By consistently making wealth‐maximizing decisions, it will allow you to achieve your highest quality of life in the fastest possible timeframe.

That is what this book is all about: living your best life as soon as possible and providing you with the knowledge and means to sustain that lifestyle throughout your lifetime. No matter what type of dreams you have, they require money. I have yet to meet a dream that is completely free. Becoming financially literate means having the knowledge to pay for those dreams so that they may become a reality in your life.

In this book I am going to teach you both conventional and nonconventional methods to increase your financial literacy and upgrade your life. Some of this information you may have heard before, and some I promise will be completely new and even controversial. I don't care about any of that. I only care about changing your life, and to do that, I need to make financial literacy more approachable, multidimensional, and executable no matter where you stand academically or where you rank on the socioeconomic ladder today. That in a nutshell is my mission.

What we won't be doing in this book is diving into the dirty details needed to become a financial analyst. You won't have a lot of academic theory thrown at you, or pages upon pages of financial diagrams with Greek letters attached to them. The truth is that, unless you are looking at becoming an analyst as a career, it is completely unnecessary to dive that deep just to build personal wealth.

What I am going to do in this book is hand you the CliffNotes version of everything you need to do to become the CEO of your own financial future and upgrade your life. I will make things as simple as possible but not so simple that it won't provide you the vital information that you do need to succeed. Even though I am going to simplify this as much as possible, it is still going to be new and somewhat challenging information. I want to set clear expectations up front that financial freedom requires a commitment, so be prepared to put in the work. You may need to read some of this information three or four times and work through it on a spreadsheet or piece of paper. There will be no extremely complex math, so a calculator, pad of paper, and a pencil will be just fine.

You may also want to spend some time on the www.closeyourwealthgaptools.com website to work with our tools to figure out your own situation. We have taken the complex work of putting together spreadsheets and done that work for you so that you just need to plug in your info. I do promise you, though, that if you are willing to put in the work, this information will be your fastest and most sustainable path to achieving your dream lifestyle.

I'm Just Like You

Let me first tell you a little about myself. I want you to know who I am primarily so you can understand I am not exceptional, I was not given an advantage over you, and if you follow what I teach you in this book, I am confident you will be more successful than you have ever imagined.

My name is Rob Luna. I am a Cuban/Italian American who grew up in Los Angeles, California, during the 1980s and early 1990s in a predominantly Hispanic neighborhood. My mother was addicted to drugs, and my older brother got caught up in heavy gang violence that dominated southern California during the late 1980s and 1990s. He was eventually imprisoned, leaving me to navigate a very tough environment alone. I had many close friends who were killed by drive‐by shootings, and, in short, my life was purely about survival as a child and teenager—survival in the sense of not only dodging gunshots daily, but also having to feed and clothe myself from about 11 years of age on.

From the perspective I have today, it was a tough life. There was no running water at times, our electricity turned off usually for a few days each month, and we moved from apartment to apartment just to dodge eviction notices.

Financial literacy was obviously not a hot topic of conversation in my house. What necessity taught me though was the fine art of entrepreneurism, which delivered some of the best financial and economic lessons of my life at a very early age.

As a young entrepreneur I was constantly hustling. I would negotiate a broker fee with neighborhood kids to sell their old bicycles on consignment, I peddled five‐dollar candy bars door to door, washed cars, cut lawns, and picked up whatever job people needed done to earn a buck.

As I grew closer to adulthood it seemed as though the gang violence in my neighborhood was increasing daily. I avoided much of it by staying involved in sports—baseball, then boxing, and finally wrestling. It was sports that offered me an opportunity to get out of Southern California at 18 and go to Arizona where my coach was able to secure a job for me, money for college, and a chance to wrestle. He told me simply this is your one chance don't F it up! I took that to heart. My wrestling career was short lived, but it was an education that saved my life and put me on a path to achieve a lifestyle that I still sometimes must pinch myself about.

They say that we make plans and God laughs at us. My life is a testament to that. My plan in my freshman year at college was to become a child psychiatrist. I was hired by a company working with at‐risk youth. This allowed me to get experience in the field, pay my bills, and attend school in the evenings. Within a very short period of time the company filed for bankruptcy, and I needed to find something to be able to make my rent payment. At the time, the newspaper was still the first place to go for job ads. I opened the paper and immediately spotted a big ad that read Hiring Stockbroker Trainees. I had no idea what that meant, but I had seen the movie Wall Street and knew that stockbrokers made a lot of money. Even though I was broke, I always aspired to achieve the better things in life. I also understood those high aspirations would take a lot of money to realize. I applied for the job with about 100 others. I was one of the lucky few selected. I was told by the hiring manager Pat Donovan, who had a heavy Brooklyn accent, that I was hired because I had the best tie, so they were going to give me a shot. Funny thing is that it was a tie I could barely afford at the time, but it turned out to be my best investment ever. Thank you, Nordstrom!

I was all‐in on this career because I truly knew it was my one opportunity that may not come again. I spent every hour I could soaking up financial content, earned numerous designations, more degrees, and read every book I could get my hands on, with my favorite being Stocks for the Long Run by Jeremy Siegel. Dr. Siegel's book took me to the Wharton School where I enrolled in an investment analyst program. This experience fueled my passion for higher education and helped me take my wealth management firm Surevest to the next level. I built Surevest from my bedroom on credit card debt. The firm grew tremendously over the years and allowed me to do financial planning and manage money for some of the nation's wealthiest people. I was invited weekly to speak on national media, I was named a Forbes Best‐in‐State Wealth Advisor, and eventually built my company into a multimillion‐dollar business that I sold to a publicly traded company and finally exited at the beginning of 2023. In a strange way I also was able to fill many of my earlier dreams, using my psychology education over those 20+ years to consult and console my clients through personal ups and downs and to manage the emotions that come with investing.

I tell you my personal story because I want you to forget any preconceived notions that you have been using for not becoming financially literate and living a better life. In this book, I am going to give you the same roadmap I use for myself today and have used for hundreds of multimillionaire clients over the past 25 years who have paid me millions of dollars for this information. I want you to throw away any excuses that will keep you and generations of your family from experiencing a better life. I want you to have no justifiable reason for not reaching your full potential.

It's Up to You

The problem, from my experience, is that I also know that even after I give you proven step‐by‐step instructions on how to put yourself in a better financial position, many of you will fail. That is not because the information isn't good (I am living proof that it is), but because you refuse to execute it. You refuse to be accountable to what it takes to break the mold of mediocrity. You refuse to adopt a different mindset—a winner's mindset, a wealth‐maximizing mindset. Some of you, however, will use this information to exponentially change the trajectory of your lives. You will live in the house you always wanted, eat at the restaurants you enjoy, go on the vacations you dreamed of, but most importantly you will empower yourselves with wealth's greatest gift of all, choice. Wealth provides the freedom to do things because you want to do them, not because you are financially forced to do them. I bet you would like to be able to say that in your own life.

When we talk about having the wealth necessary to stop working, I do not like to use the word retirement. That word conjures up the image of a couple of old people playing bridge in a nursing home in Florida. I call it work optional. The definition of work optional is working because you enjoy what you are doing, not because you must. My goal is by the end of this book for you to be on a path to making work optional as soon as possible. What I mean by that is for you to clearly know what your ideal lifestyle will cost, how much you need to save, how to invest, and where to find resources to stay on track to get it done.

As I mentioned, however, the ultimate accountability will be left in your hands. If you really want to change, this book will show you how to do it step by step.

Part I

All About the Wealth Gap and Your Relationship to Money

Chapter 1

The Wealth Gap

There is a major problem in our country that our education system and government unfortunately are not getting any closer to solving. It is well publicized that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, which is squeezing out the middle class. This is not an uncommon problem in other countries where you have the ultrawealthy living alongside people experiencing extreme poverty. I have seen it in my travel abroad to places like India. The difference is that in America, we don't have caste systems. We are born with the ability to be who and what we want to be—a freedom by the way that we must continue fighting to preserve each day.

Figure 1.1 illustrates how the wealth gap has been widening since the 1990s. In 1990, the total household wealth in the United States was $21.17 trillion of which the top 0.01% of households owned $1.83 trillion, while the bottom 50% owned only $0.77 trillion combined. This means that the wealthiest households owned about 2.4 times more wealth than the bottom 50% of households. Fast‐forward to 2022 where the total household wealth in the United States was $135.33 trillion of which the