Wealth in A Decade: Brett Machtig's Proven System for Creating Wealth, Living Off Your Investments and Attaining a Financially Secure Life

Presents a method for creating financial security through reducing spending, saving and investing, and paying off debt

Writing with freelancer Behrends, Machtig, the senior portfolio manager in the Minneapolis office of Smith Barney, decries massively prevalent credit-card debt and argues that investors should be able to live on investment income alone within 10 years through systematic saving and prudent investing. The key is defining one's objectives and having a specific plan and sticking to both. Patience and compound interest do the rest. Machtig explains the intricacies of maintaining a sound investment portfolio: balancing risk against return through diversification, adjusting projected earnings for inflation, monitoring portfolio performance and so on. Graphs help make things clear, and forms are provided for planning and tracking investments. Citing technology, social trends and population statistics, Machtig is bullish on the coming millennial decade, a posture essential to his thesis. 50,000 first printing; author tour.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

In his guide to the wealth-building process, the author advises us to learn to save systematically and invest to secure our future. He defines a wealthy person as one who is able to live off the return generated by an investment portfolio; and to achieve the wealthy status, Machtig offers lessons from his own experiences during his 10 years as a senior portfolio manager. He offers 10 universal laws for creating wealth, which include setting goals, gaining liquidity by creating a rainy-day fund, developing patience, and recognizing the importance of risk analysis. Machtig is bullish on our consumer-driven economy on the basis of research he cites predicting a massive rise in spending by baby boomers until 2007, continuous changes in technology that will spur growth, and large investments by baby boomers who are unprepared for retirement. He concludes by presenting a checklist that leads the reader to structure a personal plan for building wealth in a decade. Mary Whaley