I recently celebrated a very interesting one year anniversary with someone on My Street. In fact, from my previous experience of working with immigrant families, I was almost assured that I would have never celebrated a one year anniversary with them. Let me back up. Over twenty years ago, I left a successful career to open up my own wealth planning firm in what I call MY STREET. My Street is any typical neighborhood in America, one similar to the one in which I grew up in - a community of hard working (lower) middle class people.
The media always talks about Wall Street and Main Street. I could never identify with the people on Main Street. People on Main Street were people who worried when they heard the stock market being down, or refinanced to take advantage of lowering interest rates. People on Main Street considered taking a vacation closer to home when times were tough. People on My Street were people who worried more about losing their jobs in a tough economy. They didn’t have stocks portfolios. In fact they didn’t even have much in savings. People on My Street refinanced their homes to pull money out to pay off other debt, and vacations were something they only dreamed about. So, twenty years ago I created a financial planning firm to help hard working people create wealth on My Street.
Unfortunately, I hadn’t been able to help those rare families who had had the fortunate experience of winning the lottery or inheriting a large sum of money (usually from someone outside of their family). Coming onto sudden wealth just seemed to make these families uncomfortable. Usually before the end of a year they would decimate their funds for many reasons (most that I don’t care to get into right now). So over the that last few years, I transitioned to helping the children on My Street who went to college and became professionals or had built small businesses while keeping an eye on their parent’s finances.
Exactly a year ago, a woman in her 50’s (with very little formal education) showed up to my office telling me that she had inherited around 2 million dollars from a person that she cared for. She told me that she was going to use close to a million dollars to help her three children (in their 20’s) buy homes, and that she wanted me to help her invest the other million dollars. Based on my experience of working with people who had no experience of ever having money beyond meeting their basic needs and being highly influenced by unscrupulous family and friends, I just didn’t want to see another family lose most of their money again. I was tired of feeling completely frustrated, sad, overwhelmed and depressed about not having much control over their irrational financial behavior.
I told myself - if this family doesn’t take my advice, it will be the last family I will ever help on My Street who inherits any sudden wealth. I decided to help them with great reservation. A year later… the woman and her husband have used their wealth to buy some of the best health insurance, get an estate plan completed, put money away in an emergency reserve, build a conservative million dollar investment portfolio, and helped their children buy homes and start a business. A year later they have more money in their portfolio than they have ever had their lives. Not that I haven’t experienced certain bumps along the way with them. The bumps were overcome with continued financial education. If they continue in the right direction, not only will their lives be changed positively forever, but also those of their children and future grandchildren.
They will never know that I needed them just as much (or if not more) than they needed me. I needed them to give me continued hope that my firm could actually make a difference to the people on My Street that I came back to help. Hope continues!
