Combat Finance: How Military Values and Discipline Will Help You Achieve Financial Freedom

Introduction

Every day in this country, someone will stop and salute a complete stranger headed home from Afghanistan. Someone will thank a passerby who just finished basic training. Someone will shake a service member’s hand on the way to a new assignment. There is a level of honor and respect for people who have served, a respect reinforced by military values, discipline, and self-sacrificing morals. I have had the chance to serve with people who live these values and whom I greatly admire. A few years ago, I was deployed to Afghanistan with the Nevada Army National Guard with a group of disciplined young men and women who, through years of work, were ready to serve their country. It got me thinking: If the military can establish a shared set of leadership and service values and apply them to a process that consistently leads to success, why can’t we develop a set of leadership and service values in a process to help individuals and families to consistently achieve financial success? So I embarked on the journey of Combat Finance to tell the stories of those who serve our country and how their values, discipline, and morals can teach us financial lessons in our personal lives by using military principles and tactics as a foundation to understand finances in mainstream America.

My motivation to write this book came from Captain Doug Seymour, a witty guy I have worked with in the guard for more than a decade. At the time we served together in Afghanistan I was the executive officer, ...