How to Achieve Financial Freedom Without Wall Street

I've got to be blunt. Your financial success depends on it.

Wall Street is feeding you a narrative that's fatally, dangerously flawed when it comes to financial planning.

They make the assumption that you're going to live this way or that and, in doing so, produce a whole bunch of fancy charts, full of calculations intended to show you how much you need to save to meet their projections.

The hope is, of course, that you'll become a valued, or should I say valuable, client - meaning you're going to generate tons of commissions to line their pockets for having prepared a deep look into your financial affairs.

The reality is very different.

Those same fancy-pants charts - which, by the way, can cost you a "planning fee" ranging from $100 to several thousand dollars - usually have the opposite impact: People realize they're so far from meeting their "goals" that they give up without even trying.

I've never liked that, but then again, I've never played by the rules, either.