In any field, one of the keys to success is constantly learning. At Concentus, we are voracious readers and we’re always excited to share book recommendations with our clients. Here is a list of our perennial favorites (updated regularly as we discover new classics):
Exploring: Replacing An Outdated Paradigm For The “Retirement Years,” And Exploring A New Phase Of Life
This book focuses on the challenges and opportunities presented in retirement, with the goal of helping readers to better prepare for and maximize their happiness during these years – and achieve their long-awaited dreams.
Clarity: How Popular Culture Is Misleading You About Successful Wealth Planning and What to Do About It
Unfortunately, most Americans were never taught financial literacy growing up in school. Instead most of us develop our beliefs about wealth planning from the financial media and popular culture, which often confuse or even misinform us about the key issues. As a result, the process of planning your family’s wealth and designing an effective personal investment plan can seem intimidating and confusing, and so many families put off or neglect the process of creating an effective plan. That’s where this book can help.
Empowered Values: Planning Your Wealth Around Your Family’s Core Values
Empowered Values discusses how families should build a wealth strategy consistent with their family’s core values. It explores ways to prepare for major financial decisions and creates a needed process for the family to make important multi-generational decisions involving real estate, inheritances, and family businesses.
Abundance
We will soon be able to meet and exceed the basic needs of every man, woman, and child on the planet. Abundance for all is within our grasp. This bold, contrarian view, backed up by exhaustive research, introduces our near-term future, where exponentially growing technologies and three other powerful forces are conspiring to better the lives of billions.
BOLD: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World
A radical how-to guide for using exponential technologies, moonshot thinking, and crowd-powered tools. Part One focuses on the exponential technologies that are disrupting today’s Fortune 500 companies and enabling upstart entrepreneurs to go from “I’ve got an idea” to “I run a billion-dollar company” far faster than ever before. Part Two draws on insights from billionaires such as Larry Page, Elon Musk, Richard Branson, and Jeff Bezos and reveals their entrepreneurial secrets
Children of Paradise: Successful Parenting for Prosperous Families
Can successful parents avoid raising spoiled, self-absorbed offspring? Can busy, active parents create the type of quality time within the family that results in children feeling loved, supported, and confident? Can ambitious, achieving parents foster motivation in their children without debilitating pressure or unrealistic expectations? Can wealth transfer be done in a manner that empowers but not entitles? The answer to these universal parental concerns is a definitive yes and Children of Paradise offers a strategic parenting program, which enables parents to inspire healthy values and empower their children to develop the confidence and competencies needed to achieve their own independent success.
The Cycle of the Gift
Giving is at the core of family life–and with current laws around tax-free giving, the ultra-affluent are faced with the task of giving at perhaps largest scale in history. Beyond the tax-saving and wealth management implications, giving to family members opens up a slew of thorny questions, the biggest of which is, “How do I prepare recipients of such large gifts?” With that question and others in mind, this book takes on”The Who of Giving,” “The How of Giving,” and “The What and Why of Giving.”
Family Wealth
Every family, looking at the next generation, hopes to confer advantages that are more than just material and financial—toinculcate character and leadership, to inspire creativity andenterprise, to help all family members find and follow theirindividual callings, and to avoid the financial dependency and lossof initiative that can all too often be an unwanted consequence offinancial success. Yet many families never succeed in realizingthat vision, much less sustaining it for three, four, or fivegenerations and beyond.
Family, the Compact Among Generations
Why do some families thrive for generations? What accounts for thesad deterioration that others experience? This book takes familiesand the professionals who serve them beyond the now widely acceptedpractices offered in Family Wealth and offers a viewof Hughes’s insights into what makes families flourishand fail.
The Financially Intelligent Parent by 8 Steps to Raising Successful, Generous, Responsible Children
A parent’s guide to raising financially responsible children, this book introduces eight key principles for teaching youngsters good money values regardless of their economic backgrounds.
The Go-Giver
Since its original publication, the term “go-giver” has become shorthand for a defining set of values embraced by hundreds of thousands of people around the world. Today this timeless story continues to help its readers find fulfillment and greater success in business, in their personal lives, and in their communities.
Icarus Deception
Everyone knows that Icarus’s father made him wings and told him not to fly too close to the sun; he ignored the warning and plunged to his doom. The lesson: Play it safe. Listen to the experts. It was the perfect propaganda for the industrial economy. What boss wouldn’t want employees to believe that obedience and conformity are the keys to success?But we tend to forget that Icarus was also warned not to fly too low, because seawater would ruin the lift in his wings. Flying too low is even more dangerous than flying too high, because it feels deceptively safe.
The New Family Office: Strategies for Consulting to the Affluent
An invaluable educational tool, this book provides investment and wealth management consultants with the skills and knowledge, using different family models, to exploit the evolving environment in private wealth management and successfully deal with family assets.
The Paradox of Success: When Winning at Work Means Losing at Life
In all fields, many leaders feel that the costs of their professional victories outweigh the rewards. With nearly 30,000 copies sold, The Paradox of Success has helped leaders achieve balance in their lives.
Raising Financially Fit Kids
This combination parenting and personal finance book helps parents teach their children key money skills – such as saving, spending, budgeting, investing, building credit, and donating – that they’ll need to become financially secure adults.
The Rational Optimist
In a bold and provocative interpretation of economic history, Matt Ridley, the New York Times-bestselling author of Genome and The Red Queen, makes the case for an economics of hope, arguing that the benefits of commerce, technology, innovation, and change—what Ridley calls cultural evolution—will inevitably increase human prosperity.
The Richest Man in Babylon
Countless readers have been helped by the famous “Babylonian parables,” hailed as the greatest of all inspirational works on the subject of thrift, financial planning, and personal wealth. These fascinating and informative stories set you on a path to prosperity. Acclaimed as a modern-day classic, this celebrated bestseller offers an understanding of—and a solution to—your personal financial problems that will guide you through a lifetime.
Silver Spoon Kids, How Successful Parents Raise Responsible Children
It is natural as parents that we want to give our children the best of everything. And in an age of unprecedented wealth and easy credit, upper- and middle-income parents can indulge that urge like never before. Yet, you fear that through your generosity you are training your children to be greedy, selfish spendthrifts. The first parenting guide to focus exclusively on this increasingly sensitive topic, Silver Spoon Kids was coauthored by a psychotherapist who counsels people with money-related emotional problems and a lawyer specializing in estate planning.
The Soul of Money
Through personal stories and practical advice, Lynne Twist asks us to discover our relationship with money, understand how we use it, and by assessing our core human values, align our relationship with it to our desired goals.
Success by Ten
As the world’s leading pension fund consultant, George Russell’sadvice has been sought by many of America’s largest corporations. Apioneer in this business since the late 1960s, Russell has seen alot. Now, he shares his experiences in this field with you, andprovides valuable insights into what it takes to succeed inbusiness today.
The Ultimate Gift
A novel – both timeless and motivational. Red Stevens has died, and the older members of his family receive their millions with greedy anticipation. But a different fate awaits young Jason, whom Stevens, his great-uncle, believes may be the last vestige of hope in the family.