About Ted
MEET TED HUNTER
Ted’s Expertise
Ted Hunter understands both financial success and failure. Sixty-seven years ago, at the age of nine, he started to pay his own way and never looked back. From working his way thought college to becoming a pioneer in the design and implementation of computer-based business systems, he kept learning about how to handle money effectively. Thirty-two years ago, he co-founded a real estate brokerage company that grew to a staff of more than one hundred agents. He became a multi-millionaire and then went bankrupt in the real estate crash of the late 1980s. From this experience he came to understand the cycles of both the real estate market, and financial markets in general.
Ted then entered the stock brokerage industry as the financial advisor to thirty affluent clients and applied his hard-won insight to the stock market. He made his clients lots of money and rebuilt his own finances. Then in early 2000, before the market began to dive, he advised his clients to get out of the stock market and move their money to real estate and fixed income. He followed his own advice, selling most of his stocks and investing primarily in real estate.
In the fall of 2005, he advised everyone that the real estate market had become badly overpriced, to sell their investments, consider selling their homes, and shift to investing in the fixed income market. Again he did as he recommended, selling his real estate holdings at the peak of the market in the spring of 2006.
Although Ted graduated from a top 20 university with a major in economics, minor in business, he quickly realized that almost nothing he learned in school would have any value in the real world when it came to personal money management- that everything he would learn he would learn the hard way, from trial and error in the real world.
Ted’s real world experiences and success over 60 years have given him insight into the myths, and, in some cases, the outright lies told to Americans seeking financial advice, and the conviction that they can and must manage their money themselves. He wrote the award-winning book Money Smart and started the Money Smart project to share his knowledge and help people take control of their money and create financial freedom. A native of the New York City area, he now lives in San Jose, California, with his wife, Suchit, and their daughter, Kat. He is also the proud father of three adult sons: John, Dave, and Dan.