RULE 105

Take responsibility before you take advice

This is a follow-on from the previous Rule. If you are going to take advice you need to know in advance:

• what you expect to get
• why you are asking
• your exact position – if you don’t know, how can they advise you of anything?
• what you want to happen next
• what role they will play in that
• what action you can take if their advice is wrong/out of date/ harmful
• what further advice you might need.

And before you can do any of these you need to take responsibility.

We all start out – or at least I did, and so did most people I’ve ever talked to about it – somehow expecting that we would end up rich. It was/is an assumed process, sort of by osmosis. As you get older and add years to your life, so in theory you add riches. Then you wake up one day and it isn’t/is just like that. For me it wasn’t, so I went into hyperdrive to change the situation and am now fabulously wealthy.* But it took hard work and tremendous effort. Now you’ve made it, it is time to review. Time to take responsibility. Time to take stock. You need to know:

• where you are
• how you got there
• what you are worth – both financially and spiritually
• where you want to go next
• how you expect to get there.

When you have answered these questions you are ready to take advice about your plans. And it doesn’t have to be advice of the paid kind, the expert kind, the man-in-a-suit kind, the all serious and heavy kind. Sometimes advice can come from unlikely sources and unlikely people. Learn to listen. Learn to take in what is not being said. Learn to be happy (gosh that’s a big one for all of us).

The wealthier we become, the easier it appears to be to hand over our affairs (financial ones) to people we think have our best interests at heart or who we assume know what they are doing or are on top of the latest developments and laws. My observation is that (a) they’re not and (b) the shrewd wealthy ones don’t hand over anything unless they are really, really sure of their advisers. And that’s my advice.