Money for Life
Monday, June 29th, 2009
Like many people, I don’t claim to know all the details of Bernie Madoff’s massive Ponzi scheme. In fact, I’m just as caught up in the disbelief at the whole thing as everyone else. I do not know anyone personally who lost money in this scam, but I know many others, some well, who have lost money to fraudsters over the years. My heart aches for the thousands of people whose lives have been forever altered because they trusted someone with their money who was not honest. I know what it’s like to lose money and no matter how seemingly insignificant the amount, it is always incredibly painful.
While Bernie Madoff has now traded the rest of his life for the money and lifestyle that was created from this scheme with the 150 year prison sentence he received, there are others who have unwillingly done the same. I wish I could wave a magic wand to help them go back in time to prevent or minimize the effects, but since that is impossible, I will use it as an opportunity to remind everyone (myself included) of the principles of know yourself, know your advisor and know your investment. We certainly will not be able to prevent fraud, but hopefully we can use some processes and decision making tools to help make personal financial decisions that can minimize the devastation of losing money.
The process should be life first and then money, not vise-versa. This is some of the earliest work I did in the area of values-based financial decision making. If you’d like to know more, please visit www.moneyminding.com for the ‘Accepting Financial Advice’ report, or ‘Lifestyle Financial Assessment’ and the ’12 Step Plan’ roadmap to help make sense of this situation going forward.
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