The Six Robbers of Wealth and How to Avoid Them

Abstract

In Investing Strategies for the High Net Worth Investor, I stressed that the only dollars that were material to long-term success were those that stayed in the portfolio net of an investor’s spending, taxes, fees, and inflation. To those wealth diminishers, two other things rob an investment portfolio of future success: late starts and mistakes. Many advisors and others who write about wealth accumulation focus on fees and then address the other five. In my view, this gets it completely backwards. In this chapter, I approach each of these wealth robbers in their order of importance based on the magnitude of the dollar impact on the portfolios of investors who get these issues right versus those who don’t.