Wealth Odyssey

Better Financial Education was founded in 1996 to address the lack of public education available to people. Larry Frank Sr. established a 12 hour, 4 evening course that discusses the A to Z in financial topics. It provides the foundation education in personal finance. There is no meal, no product pitch, nor sales angle in the course.

Early on, people would ask about additional reading material so they could continue to learn about money. Frank addressed these early requests by bringing in current books on investing, market history, investment philosophy, financial planning, retirement planning, and other money related topics.

Frank noticed that people often did not respond to the current published materials because the books address specific topics, but they did not show people how to solve the total of their concerns, issues, and problems. The books went into detail about something specific, but they did not show people how to relate all these books together or how to address all the concerns they had for all the different topics they had in which they had concerns. How do you approach life's complexities for retirement, college funding, insurances, vacations, wills or trusts, and investing all at the same time? What was missing was how do you put all of life's issues together?

The idea for Wealth Odyssey was born through observing and talking with real people about what they were really trying to do, but could not find a resource that helped them do that. The fundamental observation was that people viewed their finances through a flawed income-based perspective. They didn't have the resources to apply to everything that concerned them so they felt uneasy about what they were not doing.

Wealth Odyssey changes the perspective to a more manageable asset-based perspective. Through this lens, people can now visualize how all the financial issues relate to each other, and how to prioritize and allocated their resources to address those financial concerns that are really bothering them. More importantly, Wealth Odyssey simplifies the issue of retirement planning.

Once read, and understood, Wealth Odyssey helps people use all the tools and calculators out there to solve their issues. Better Financial Education's website (www.BetterFinancialEducation.com) contains many educational articles, web seminars, calculators, and featured links to other educational focused websites to assist people with their planning.

Road sign on the journey: Better Financial Education (and other such websites-see featured links on that site) provide the tools to calculate the solutions ... while Wealth Odyssey (the book and this website) helps people to put all these diverse solutions together to support their unique way of living, their goals and their aspirations. Both these steps are important before you try to save or invest; then you can benchmark your progress with yourself, not an impersonal market index.