5 Financial Wake-Up Calls—And What You Can Learn from Them
High achievers reveal their big financial aha! moments and the lessons you can use to live your dreams in Bobbi Rebell's How to Be a Financial Grownup.
By Bobbi Rebell
Stephen Adler, President and Editor-in-Chief, Reuters
My Wake-Up Call
One day I saw an ad for a CD at a bank in the Bronx and got set to head up there. My boss, The American Lawyer magazine editor-in-chief and budding mogul Steven Brill, asked where I was going—and put an abrupt stop to my journey. He sat me down in his office and showed me on a yellow legal pad how much my time was worth at my job versus how much I would earn by leaving my desk to score an extra quarter point on a bank CD. And, in stronger language than I'm using here, he told me what a jerk I was for not understanding that my biggest asset and investment at this life stage was my job—not my IRA—and that the energy I was putting into chasing CD alpha was better spent writing and editing for his magazine.
What You Can Learn
Getting and holding a job, and doing the kind of work that might lead to getting promoted, are a whole lot more important than picking the right stock or the hottest fund or the perfect CD.
Published 10/18/2016