Quote from Scataphagos:
A GOOD adviser would keep unsophisticated clients from making dumb and overly risky investments. I was an avid tennis player (USTA 5.0), so I noticed what happend to some of the tennis stars. Bjorn Borg blew his entire fortune on starting his name-brand clothing company... something like $26 Million (in the '70s). How stupid and unnecessary a risk was that??
I have at least a dozen stories of clients from my advisory days who captured a big windfall of some sort... who, in spite of my recommendations to either lock some of it safely away or at least pay attention and exercise a stop... ALL FAILED TO HEED MY ADVICE. I guess they hoped to be the next Bill Gates. As you can imagine, ALL regretted not listening to me. Not a single one "got away with" their foolish and unnecessary greed. You can lead a horse to water...
Financial education and money management in life are more important than the starting dollar amounts. Sounds a lot like trading. Unfortunately, telling people what to do rarely works, because people have behavioral habits that need active work to change, and new better habits have to be practiced at the same time. Change is hard painful lonely and uncomfortable. That's why so few people do it. The media (and now government) sells us pleasure, happiness and comfort....seems ironic huh on the surface.
Just because you as their manager may have good financial habits that would prevent this disaster, doesn't mean a few words to clients will change the habits and beliefs they have about money and wealth. Better to make your quick buck and leave the sinking ship, to have them change requires work on their part that they probably would resist.
Even if you had power of attn over their money, and you have the habits to manage their affairs directly, it could also be likely that you woudlnt' do it as well as you would take care of your own. Underneath it all people all seem to have a need to get the other guys chips, no matter what the initial intention, stated or unstated.
All of this conditioning runs so deep, and that may be one reason why lottery winners also nearly always end up a few years later in the same financial position they were in before their windfall.
The factor people need to measure that is MOST important, is not income it is NET WORTH. This is the starting point and all financial decisions probably should be filtered through this data. How does this decision with money and/or time likely affect my net worth?
The second criteria is an operational definition for wealth that might incorporate net worth, how many days or how much time you can live well without working, etc. Too many people associate wealth with income, cash reserves, assets, and those parameters simply are an incomplete picture of true wealth or prosperity that is likely to endure.