Introduction

Warning: this book is going to provide you with a plain-English and very specific financial roadmap that will show you how to significantly improve your life. The problem is that this knowledge will shatter any excuses you had up to this point, cause you to act more strategically, and force you to deploy discipline into every aspect of your financial life. Furthermore, once you see how easy it is, you will want to kick yourself hard for not learning and implementing this stuff sooner! With all that said, I think you can handle it, and I can't wait to hear your success story.

What Is Financial Literacy?

Financial literacy is a major buzz word that grabs a lot of attention these days. If you ask five different people what it means to them, you will probably get five different answers. For the purposes of this book, we are going to define financial literacy in this way:

Financial literacy is gaining and/or accessing the knowledge that is required to optimize all the financial decisions you will need to make during your lifetime. By consistently making wealth-maximizing decisions, it will allow you to achieve your highest quality of life in the fastest possible timeframe.

That is what this book is all about: living your best life as soon as possible and providing you with the knowledge and means to sustain that lifestyle throughout your lifetime. No matter what type of dreams you have, they require money. I have yet to meet a dream that is completely free. Becoming financially literate means having the knowledge to pay for those dreams so that they may become a reality in your life.

In this book I am going to teach you both conventional and nonconventional methods to increase your financial literacy and upgrade your life. Some of this information you may have heard before, and some I promise will be completely new and even controversial. I don't care about any of that. I only care about changing your life, and to do that, I need to make financial literacy more approachable, multidimensional, and executable no matter where you stand academically or where you rank on the socioeconomic ladder today. That in a nutshell is my mission.

What we won't be doing in this book is diving into the dirty details needed to become a financial analyst. You won't have a lot of academic theory thrown at you, or pages upon pages of financial diagrams with Greek letters attached to them. The truth is that, unless you are looking at becoming an analyst as a career, it is completely unnecessary to dive that deep just to build personal wealth.

What I am going to do in this book is hand you the CliffNotes version of everything you need to do to become the CEO of your own financial future and upgrade your life. I will make things as simple as possible but not so simple that it won't provide you the vital information that you do need to succeed. Even though I am going to simplify this as much as possible, it is still going to be new and somewhat challenging information. I want to set clear expectations up front that financial freedom requires a commitment, so be prepared to put in the work. You may need to read some of this information three or four times and work through it on a spreadsheet or piece of paper. There will be no extremely complex math, so a calculator, pad of paper, and a pencil will be just fine.

You may also want to spend some time on the www.closeyourwealthgaptools.com website to work with our tools to figure out your own situation. We have taken the complex work of putting together spreadsheets and done that work for you so that you just need to plug in your info. I do promise you, though, that if you are willing to put in the work, this information will be your fastest and most sustainable path to achieving your dream lifestyle.

I'm Just Like You

Let me first tell you a little about myself. I want you to know who I am primarily so you can understand I am not exceptional, I was not given an advantage over you, and if you follow what I teach you in this book, I am confident you will be more successful than you have ever imagined.

My name is Rob Luna. I am a Cuban/Italian American who grew up in Los Angeles, California, during the 1980s and early 1990s in a predominantly Hispanic neighborhood. My mother was addicted to drugs, and my older brother got caught up in heavy gang violence that dominated southern California during the late 1980s and 1990s. He was eventually imprisoned, leaving me to navigate a very tough environment alone. I had many close friends who were killed by drive-by shootings, and, in short, my life was purely about survival as a child and teenager-survival in the sense of not only dodging gunshots daily, but also having to feed and clothe myself from about 11 years of age on.

From the perspective I have today, it was a tough life. There was no running water at times, our electricity turned off usually for a few days each month, and we moved from apartment to apartment just to dodge eviction notices.

Financial literacy was obviously not a hot topic of conversation in my house. What necessity taught me though was the fine art of entrepreneurism, which delivered some of the best financial and economic lessons of my life at a very early age.

As a young "entrepreneur" I was constantly hustling. I would negotiate a broker fee with neighborhood kids to sell their old bicycles on consignment, I peddled five-dollar candy bars door to door, washed cars, cut lawns, and picked up whatever job people needed done to earn a buck.

As I grew closer to adulthood it seemed as though the gang violence in my neighborhood was increasing daily. I avoided much of it by staying involved in sports-baseball, then boxing, and finally wrestling. It was sports that offered me an opportunity to get out of Southern California at 18 and go to Arizona where my coach was able to secure a job for me, money for college, and a chance to wrestle. He told me simply "this is your one chance don't F it up"! I took that to heart. My wrestling career was short lived, but it was an education that saved my life and put me on a path to achieve a lifestyle that I still sometimes must pinch myself about.

They say that we make plans and God laughs at us. My life is a testament to that. My plan in my freshman year at college was to become a child psychiatrist. I was hired by a company working with at-risk youth. This allowed me to get experience in the field, pay my bills, and attend school in the evenings. Within a very short period of time the company filed for bankruptcy, and I needed to find something to be able to make my rent payment. At the time, the newspaper was still the first place to go for job ads. I opened the paper and immediately spotted a big ad that read "Hiring Stockbroker Trainees." I had no idea what that meant, but I had seen the movie Wall Street and knew that stockbrokers made a lot of money. Even though I was broke, I always aspired to achieve the "better things" in life. I also understood those high aspirations would take a lot of money to realize. I applied for the job with about 100 others. I was one of the lucky few selected. I was told by the hiring manager Pat Donovan, who had a heavy Brooklyn accent, that I was hired because I had the best tie, so they were going to give me a "shot." Funny thing is that it was a tie I could barely afford at the time, but it turned out to be my best investment ever. Thank you, Nordstrom!

I was all-in on this career because I truly knew it was my one opportunity that may not come again. I spent every hour I could soaking up financial content, earned numerous designations, more degrees, and read every book I could get my hands on, with my favorite being Stocks for the Long Run by Jeremy Siegel. Dr. Siegel's book took me to the Wharton School where I enrolled in an investment analyst program. This experience fueled my passion for higher education and helped me take my wealth management firm Surevest to the next level. I built Surevest from my bedroom on credit card debt. The firm grew tremendously over the years and allowed me to do financial planning and manage money for some of the nation's wealthiest people. I was invited weekly to speak on national media, I was named a Forbes Best-in-State Wealth Advisor, and eventually built my company into a multimillion-dollar business that I sold to a publicly traded company and finally exited at the beginning of 2023. In a strange way I also was able to fill many of my earlier dreams, using my psychology education over those 20+ years to consult and console my clients through personal ups and downs and to manage the emotions that come with investing.

I tell you my personal story because I want you to forget any preconceived notions that you have been using for not becoming financially literate and living a better life. In this book, I am going to give you the same roadmap I use for myself today and have used for hundreds of multimillionaire clients over the past 25 years who have paid me millions of dollars for this information. I want you to throw away any excuses that will keep you and generations of your family from experiencing a better life. I want you to have no justifiable reason for not reaching your full potential.

It's Up to You

The problem, from my experience, is that I also know that even after I give you proven step-by-step instructions on how to put yourself in a better financial position,...