The Resilient Investor

If you want to build a better life and a better world—and really be prepared for any possible future in these turbulent times—you need to become a resilient investor! This trailblazing guide will expand your ideas of investing way beyond Wall Street. Your time, your energy, and the things you own are investments too, and you'll learn to diversify them in ways that move you toward your life goals. The Resilient Investment Map lays out all your assets—personal and physical as well as financial—and then provides three essential, timely strategies (Close to Home, Sustainable Global Economy, and Evolutionary Investing) that will help you grow each of them. The goal is to become more resilient: able to anticipate disturbance, rebuild as necessary, and improve when possible. You'll discover that the choices making you more resilient also enhance our communities, our economy, and the planet—building real wealth for all.

We are all investors. We invest our time, our energy, our money. We invest every single day, as citizens, as consumers, as businesspeople. At its core, investing involves connection, exchange, and mutual benefit. Lately, however, the primary, beneficial function of investing has been overshadowed by ever-more mechanized iterations of finance. We have created funds of funds, securitizations of securitizations, and entire firms whose business is based on harvesting the advantage of microseconds of trading speed. The Nature of Investing calls for a transformation of the investment process from the roots up. Drawing on the author's twenty-plus years of leadership experience in top investment firms, the book connects real-world finance with the field of biomimicry. Citing real-life examples and discussing principles from the natural world, The Nature of Investing shows how we can create an investment framework that is different from the mechanized one currently employed. Readers will discover an approach that re-aligns investing with the world it was originally meant to serve. An approach that values resiliency over rigidity and elegant simplicity over synthetic complexity. This is the true nature of investing.

Investing in Resilience: Ensuring a Disaster-Resistant Future focuses on the steps required to ensure that investment in disaster resilience happens and that it occurs as an integral, systematic part of development. At-risk communities in Asia and the Pacific can apply a wide range of policy, capacity, and investment instruments and mechanisms to ensure that disaster risk is properly assessed, disaster risk is reduced, and residual risk is well managed. Yet, real progress in strengthening resilience has been slow to date and natural hazards continue to cause significant loss of life, damage, and disruption in the region, undermining inclusive, sustainable development. Investing in Resilience offers an approach and ideas for reflection on how to achieve disaster resilience. It does not prescribe specific courses of action but rather establishes a vision of a resilient future. It stresses the interconnectedness and complementarity of possible actions to achieve disaster resilience across a wide range of development policies, plans, legislation, sectors, and themes. The vision shows how resilience can be accomplished through the coordinated action of governments and their development partners in the private sector, civil society, and the international community. The vision encourages “investors” to identify and prioritize bundles of actions that collectively can realize that vision of resilience, breaking away from the current tendency to pursue disparate and fragmented disaster risk management measures that frequently trip and fall at unforeseen hurdles. Investing in Resilience aims to move the disaster risk reduction debate beyond rhetoric and to help channel commitments into investment, incentives, funding, and practical action

From William Green, a financial journalist who has written for The New Yorker, Time, and Fortune, comes a fresh and unexpectedly profound book that draws on interviews with more than 40 of the worlds super-investors to demonstrate that the keys for building wealth hold other life lessons as well.

Local Dollars, Local Sense is a guide to creating Community Resilience. Americans' long-term savings in stocks, bonds, mutual funds, pension funds, and life insurance funds total about $30 trillion. But not even 1 percent of these savings touch local small business-even though roughly half the jobs and the output in the private economy come from them. So, how can people increasingly concerned with the poor returns from Wall Street and the devastating impact of global companies on their communities invest in Main Street? In Local Dollars, Local Sense, local economy pioneer Michael Shuman shows investors, including the nearly 99% who are unaccredited, how to put their money into building local businesses and resilient regional economies-and profit in the process. A revolutionary toolbox for social change, written with compelling personal stories, the book delivers the most thorough overview available of local investment options, explains the obstacles, and profiles investors who have paved the way. Shuman demystifies the growing realm of local investment choices-from institutional lending to investment clubs and networks, local investment funds, community ownership, direct public offerings, local stock exchanges, crowdfunding, and more. He also guides readers through the lucrative opportunities to invest locally in their homes, energy efficiency, and themselves. A rich resource for both investors and the entrepreneurs they want to support, Local Dollars, Local Sense eloquently shows how to truly protect your financial future--and your community's.

“As so many Americans feel powerless to confront a financial system designed to serve the few, Shuman offers us real choices: tools that align our lives with our values. That's power. I love this highly readable, timely, surprising book.” —Frances Moore Lappé, author of Daring Democracy and Diet for a Small Planet Americans agree on very little these days, but red state conservatives and blue state progressives can agree on one critical point: Wall Street can no longer be trusted. Yet most of us continue to invest our money in the stocks and bonds of Fortune 500 companies, transferring our capital far from where we live and work. Local investing expert Michael Shuman offers another alternative. He shows how we can use two well-established—but rarely used—investment tools to keep our money close and get a return as good as or better than what we'd get investing in distant, indifferent corporations. Shuman explains the nuts and bolts of self-directed IRAs and solo 401(k)s and how they can be combined with other recently legalized local investing tools. He details how to set these accounts up, identify and evaluate a whole range of local investment opportunities, and make sure account holders stay on the right side of the law. While the book is written for people without a lot of investment experience—Shuman explains concepts like “liquidity” and “diversification” in simple terms—even if you're as experienced as Warren Buffett, this book will make you rethink everything you know about investing. With Shuman's expert advice, you can strengthen your investment portfolio and your community, neighborhoods, and schools at the same time!

Explores the local investing movement, whereby investing in local businesses rather than giant conglomerates helps earn profits while building healthy, self-reliant communities, and introduces the ideas and pioneers behind the movement and offers investment strategies.

"The case for investing in your own career before anything else Michael Ellsberg and Bryan Franklin think you've been fed a lie: that if you save for decades and invest in 401(k)s, IRAs, and a home, these investments will grow steadily over decades, allowing twenty to thirty years of secure, peaceful retirement. This might have been true at some point in the last century, but it is not true any longer. If you want to get ahead and enjoy a life of prosperity, the authors argue that you must invest in the most powerful source of wealth you'll ever know: your own earning power. Ellsberg and Franklin reveal how investing in yourself in various ways can guarantee a return much higher than the stock market or real estate. Boosting your skills, leadership, persuasion ability, and your network enriches the quality and meaning of your life at the same time that it enriches your wallet. Why wouldn't you bet on yourself?"--