This is all about the foundation of financial success: wealth strategy. My key purpose here is to draw a clear, unmistakable distinction between wealth strategy and what usually passes for "financial planning."

To be blunt, conventional financial planning is based on a scarcity mentality. Professional financial planners will ask you what is the minimum you can retire on. They will help you list all the expenses you can do without when you are older. In other words, they will plan for you to retire poor!

The financial methodology behind this is all about savings, not investment. The driving idea is what people call "the miracle of compound interest". The real miracle is that anyone can retire at all on the basis of compound interest alone!

True wealth strategy implies that you intend to retire rich, not poor. That is to say, as the years pass your net worth should continue to grow and when you stop working it should be greater than it is now. So should your income. For most people, that isn't going to happen merely through saving, nor through compound interest.

There are two keys to a strategy that delivers real wealth: one is leverage, and the other is the velocity of money. In this email, I can only introduce these core ideas. You will find an increasing amount of information about leverage and velocity of money at Wealth Strategy U.

Meanwhile, here are some key points to start with.

The concept of leverage is widely known, and widely misunderstood because it is generally equated with "OPM" — other people's money. Using OPM is just one important example of leverage. True leverage covers just about every area of business and life. When you fully understand and use leverage to build wealth, you will be making effective use of other people's money, time, ideas, skills, labor and professional advice.

Leverage is intimately connected to velocity of money, which is the principle of keeping your cash on the move. This is the very opposite of the savings mentality, which allows money to sit in one place accumulating a meager flow of compound interest. When you apply velocity, you actively seek new ways to deploy your capital, always with an eye to leverage.

This portion is about tax, but in a special context. Usually, people think about taxation separately from their wealth building activities. Tax is seen simply as a negative to overcome on the path to financial growth.

This is a costly mistake. Approached correctly, taxation can be one of your most powerful engines of financial growth. The right strategy can accelerate the increase of both your business value and your personal net worth. It is no exaggeration to say that the right tax methodologies can literally double your return on investment and your overall wealth.

How is this possible, while remaining strictly ethical and within the law? The answer is simple to state, but takes a tremendous amount of learning and effort to apply. To begin with, you have to understand the immensely complex US tax laws inside and out. More than that, you must keep current with the endless changes that Congress brings to the Internal Revenue Code. I am talking here about a level of expertise, and a commitment to continuous learning, that far exceeds that of the average CPA.

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