How to turn marketing students into millionaires: Decision making for personal wealth management
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Joseph Bonnici* and Dwight M. Scherban Both authors are professors of Marketing at Central Connecticut State University.
Abstract Marketing promotes exchange, consumption, selling, and retailing in a society bent on spending and living beyond its means. In the meantime, students’ debts continue to spiral. Marketing professors should teach students how to resist salespeople, retailers, and advertising pitches, and strive to save and invest rather waste financial resources. Frugality is the cornerstone of wealth accumulation. It is not one’s income that serves as the primary indicator of one’s wealth; the primary indicator is how much goes into savings and investments. A paltry one-time $2,000 investment in a Roth IRA during a student’s undergraduate years may balloon to $194,000 by the time the student retires from the workforce. Savings, investments, compound interest, marriage, education, and voluntary simplicity compound into a financially rewarding lifelong journey for the frugal student who resists a consumption-oriented culture. Journal of Financial Services Marketing (2006) 11, 125–130. doi:10.1057/palgrave.fsm.4760007 Keywords Savings, wealth, millionaire, marketing, frugality
INTRODUCTION Reasons why students major in marketing include difficulty with quantitative subjects such as accounting, and the dream of successful advertising and selling as determinants of hefty salaries and commissions. Tuition is expensive, especially in most American universities, and a rewarding financial return is expected for the years-long risk of pursuing an undergraduate marketing education. The dream of affluence is further inculcated into the students’ mind when marketing majors are required to take introductory courses in *Correspondence: Marketing Department, School of Business, Central Connecticut State University, 1615 Stanley Street, PO Box 4010 New Britain, CT 06050-4010, USA e-mail: [email protected]
© 2006 Palgrave Macmillan Ltd 1363-0539 $30.00
Vol. 11, 2 125–130
other business subjects such as banking and finance that expose them to tales of wealth and financial opportunities.
The problem with marketing in the midst of all this is that the subject encourages shopping and consumption that waste away an individual’s scarce financial resources. It encourages students to measure their worth by the possession of automobiles, iPods, computers, and other gadgets that dent their savings. A misconception among both students and the general public is that wealth is directly correlated to one’s salary. The more a person earns, they wrongly assume, the more a person saves and accumulates. Another misconception is that smart investing in techs, oil, or whatever tends to be hot in the stock market is the ticket to financial success.
Journal of Financial Services Marketing
www.palgrave-journals.com/fsm
125
Bonnici and Scherban
SAVINGS Nothing could be further from the truth according to recent studies which examine ‘the surprising secrets of America’s wealthy’.1 The accumulation of wealth is not dependant on how
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