Book description
Selected as one of Motley Fool's “5 Great Books You Should Read”
Advice on managing your wealth from bestselling author Bill Bonner
From trusted New York Times bestselling author Bill Bonner
comes a radical new way to look at family money and a practical,
actionable guide to getting and maintaining multigenerational wealth.
Family Fortunes: How to Build Family Wealth and Hold on to It for
100 Years is packed with useful information, interwoven with
Bonner's stories about his own family's wealth philosophy and practices.
A comprehensive guide that shows how families can successfully
preserve their estates by ignoring most of what people think they know
about "the rich" and, instead, training and motivating all
family members to work together toward a very uncommon goal. This book
is a must-read for all individual investors-even those who do not plan
to leave money to their children-because it challenges many of the
most ubiquitous principles and rules of investing.
You might expect a book on family wealth to be extremely conservative
in its outlook. Instead, the Bonners announce what is practically a
revolutionary manifesto. They explain:
- Why family money should NOT be invested in "safe,
conservative" investments
- Why charitable giving is usually a waste of money, or worse
- Why it is NOT a good idea to let children go their own way
- Why you can't trust wealth "professionals" and why you
should never entrust your money to money managers
- Why giving your children as much education as possible is NOT a
good idea
- Why Warren Buffett and the rest of the rich people asking for
higher tax rates are wrong to take "the pledge"
- Why Wall Street is a graveyard for capital, why most celebrity
CEOs are a threat to the businesses they run, why modern capitalism
is a failure, and more
You will come away with a very different idea as to what family
wealth is all about. It is not stodgy. Not boring. Not moss-backed and
reactionary. On the contrary, it is the most dynamic, forward-looking
capital in the world. The essential guide to passing wealth from one
generation to the next, Family Fortunes is filled with
concrete, practical advice you can put to use right away.
BILL BONNER is President and CEO of Agora Publishing, one of
the world's largest financial newsletter companies. He is the creator
of the Daily Reckoning, a financial newsletter with more than
540,000 readers of six different global daily editions, including
French and German. Bonner is coauthor of the international bestsellers
Financial Reckoning Day and Empire of Debt with
Addison Wiggin, as well as Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets
(coauthored with Lila Rajiva), the New York Times
bestseller. In 2011, he wrote Dice Have No Memory: Big
Bets and Bad Economics from Paris to the Pampas. He files his
Daily Reckoning dispatches from a ranch in Argentina, the
home office in Maryland, various joint ventures, and other hot spots
around the globe.
WILL BONNER is Executive Director of the Bonner & Partners
Family Office, an independent estate planning and investment research
group. Will got his start working in the "mailroom" of the
family business, Agora, at age eleven. Later, he helped launch, and
served as CEO of Early to Rise, a leading self-improvement publishing
business. In 2007, he opened Agora's South American office in Buenos
Aires, Argentina, and set up a successful business partnership that is
one of the largest investment research and education companies
publishing in Spanish. He is a graduate of St. John's College's Great
Books program, earning a double major in philosophy and mathematics.
Bonner lives with his wife and two children in Delray Beach, Florida.
He's the eldest of Bill's six children.
