I knew this guy was going to be difficult. I did exam prep for people who could not pass their licensing exams for the US financial services industry. What was your most lucrative piece of work? Today, it is worth multiple millions of dollars.īut I don’t regret it, because I don’t know how I would have been able to run my career while renovating a house. I thought it would take a long time to renovate it, and it was all the way uptown. It was beautiful, four storeys with original glass and features. What was your worst financial decision?Ī friend said she wanted me to buy her family’s town house in Harlem for $150,000. I bought them for $4,000 and sold them for over $250,000. So I bought Dell stock.īy the time I sold them, I had 10,000 shares. I thought if I can create a book with this, someone more technically sophisticated could create great things. I bought a Dell computer and figured out how to use it. What was I thinking?! What was your best financial decision? And we shot in a helicopter looking at the City of London, and I had to deliver a piece to camera as the helicopter tilted. We filmed a sequence on the top of the Lloyd's Building, which was pretty scary. We worked really hard to make that show a success. I thought the English had a way of not saying what they meant, so I’d written it off. The screen test happened in March, and I didn’t hear anything from the BBC until December. If I could explain derivatives to people, then I thought I’d get the job. We shot a screen test, and I wrote a script explaining derivative securities, using a car as an example of how they work. At the end of the evening, he said: “I think you should be on television.” I went on to design and teach classes about investment markets, including giving seminars to financial institutions in London. When I came to New York City, I was earning $22,500 a year, and my rent ate up 60pc of my take-home pay, but I was determined to make it work, and I was hungry for those dollars. It was one of the most life-changing decisions, financially, of my life. It opened me up to understanding money, how investments and the stock market work, how banking works. I moved to New York, taking a job on Wall Street at Leo Fleur Training International, which created course material for financial exams. How did you get into financial education? It took two years to get out of debt, I was very disciplined about it. To pay off my debt, I moved to a cheaper apartment downtown, took a second job and worked extra shifts. Every store where I shopped, I applied for credit cards. Then I got my first car on credit, and to buy gas, I got a Gulf Oil credit card. That was the time I got my first credit cards. My salary was $13,000 per year, and I spent more than 40pc on rent. I bought really great things: my first dishes, which were Wedgewood, and an olive Armani jacket. It was wild, having money, because I’d never had money. When I graduated, I joined the executive training programme of Jordan Marsh. I would give the money to my grandmother, and she used it to open a savings account. You would have to fill up a quart can, and were paid $1 per can. You could work with a group of guys in the forest, beating posts into the ground, and making them vibrate by rubbing a car strut across them, to bring worms to the surface. In the summer in the South, a lot of people went fishing, because we were near the Gulf Coast. My grandmother would give us a nickel or a dime to go to the store, and that’s when I would buy Viewmaster slides of cities like Paris. My mother could not take all of us to town at one time, so typically you went in your birthday month. We only got pocket money when we went to town. There would be times when we ran out of money, and she would say “Let’s go fishing”, and we’d catch mullet and have that with grits for dinner. She never earned more than $4,000 a year in her entire life. My mother worked as a day maid in the house of a white family. We kept chickens, we grew okra, corn, black-eyed peas, tomatoes, we grew everything, and we only went to town to buy dry and canned goods, once a month. I was brought up in Crawfordville, Florida, by my mother and grandmother, and I’m the oldest of seven siblings. How did your upbringing affect your attitude to money? He is the author of 18 books on investing and personal finance, and lives in Manhattan. After winning a scholarship to college, Hall made a career in financial education. Money guru Alvin Hall: ‘I save from my own fear… I am my safety net’įrom a dollar for a can of worms to $500 an hour for finance classes, Alvin Hall tells how he came to teach Britons about moneyįinancial expert and presenter Alvin Hall, 68, is best known in the UK for the BBC show Your Money or Your Life, which ran for five series between 19.
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