Bestselling Canadian author and personal finance expert Andrew Hallam has been passing the winter in the Lake Chapala area and will share his unique take on the financial services sector at two meetings at the Lake Chapala Society scheduled Sunday, December 7 and Monday, December 15, both starting at noon.
During the talks, Hallam promises to present proof that the average investor earns terrible returns. “I’ll show how to prevent the financial service industry from continuing to bleed your money,” he vows.
Hallam is not afraid to lock horns with industry heavyweights, a breed he calls “greedy” and corrupted by “conflicts of interest.”
“Many retirees invested in the stock market for much of their working career,” he says. “But unfortunately, most were robbed.” (Hallam notes that between January 1980 and November 2014, the U.S. stock market gained 4,591 percent, a figure that would have turned $10,000US into $469,099US. “Few investors earned anything close to those returns,” he adds.)
This is no cheap talk from Hallam, who has followed up his 2011 bestseller “Millionaire Teacher” with “The Global Expatriate’s Guide to Investing,” a funny, easy-to-read, how-to book that advocates the need to be self-reliant when investing for retirement.
As a teacher at an international school in Singapore for 13 years, Hallam speaks from experience when addressing the problems facing expat investors. “When I went abroad for first time, I met people in the same boat who weren’t paying into U.S. Social Security or a Canadian or British pension. You’re on your own and the financial service companies were incredibly expensive and charged such high commissions.”
But Hallam had an advantage over the many expats he met who voiced concern at their financial futures. He had started investing at the age of 19 after befriending a car mechanic in Vancouver who amassed a million-dollar fortune on an average salary through canny investing.
Using strategies designed to get the highest statistical odds of success in the stock and bond markets and eschewing the prohibitive costs of working with financial advisors, Hallam built a million-dollar investment portfolio by the time he was 38.
Now 44 and “retired,” he writes a column for Canada’s Globe and Mail and the U.S. financial services company AssetBuilder, while fulfilling a “mission” to share the secrets of his success with as many people as possible.
While Hallam describes “Millionaire Teacher” as “more of generic book on the investing process,” his follow-up tome provides more specific detail of investment options and profiles real expats and their stories.
“The first book didn’t talk about the stainable withdrawal rate, how much a retiree can take from their portfolio. Nor did it go into detail about figuring out how much you should be putting away,” he explains.
“The Global Expatriate’s Guide” consists of a treasure trove of strategic advice on topics such as the advantages of index funds, the disadvantages of inflexible and expensive offshore pensions, couch potato investing, choosing a financial advisor and how to avoid the hidden fees that can bleed investors dry.
In this hands-on book that he advises being read while connected to the Internet, Hallam provides a country-by-country breakdown of the costs and services of different brokerage firms in the United States, Canada, Great Britain, South America, Asia, Europe, Australia and New Zealand. He also spotlights the new institutions with low fees that allow a well diversified global portfolio to be put together for less than 0.20 percent a year.
Retirees, those about to retire or those setting out on a new life in a foreign land, would do themselves no harm in listening to Hallam talk or picking up a copy of his new book, available in hardcover or Kindle on Amazon at $22.19US and $14.51US respectively.