Hi, I am Liborio your coach
While I love teaching technical courses at the training facility I currently work at, I have coached and mentored people in their lives and their careers for the past 40 plus years. In the past 13 years out of necessity I had to learn how financial systems work if I wanted a decent retirement. Honestly, I thought to myself, the way I was going financially I could never retire, I thought that I would have to work until I was 75 or I’d probably drop dead on the job. It was going to be one or the other, things didn’t look too good for me.
In the summer of 2011, I got hired by the MTA /New York City Transit as a maintenance supervisor. A year had gone by, I was working at Spring Creek, one of MTAs bus depots. One day at work one of my coworkers, Nick Milano, asked me what plans have I made for retirement? I answered, I don’t have any I’m broke, the 2008 “Great Financial Crisis” wiped me out. After starting and running 3 businesses since 1991 there I was in 2011 I had to get a job. Nick and I had a mutual understanding we had similar upbringing and back grounds. Nick told me that was no excuse. Being broke is only temporary. It’s a rite of passage most people go through. You think your special, you are the only one that went broke? You need to get your ass up off the floor, dust yourself off and get going my friend. Your 52 you have a lot of catching up to do. You can’t wait for tomorrow to start planning for retirement you should have started 20 years ago.
With that wake-up call, Nick just laid on me, I had a lot to think about. Nick was right, I needed to start making plans. I didn’t know where to begin with this retirement thing. I asked Nick where I should begin? What do I need to do besides my pension plan I had with the MTA. He told me that the pension from the company wasn’t going to make a dent for retirement because my time horizon wasn’t much, unless I was going to work until age 76. I said to him that I would like to retire sooner than that. Nick told me that I needed to start investing in mutual funds as soon as possible, if I wanted to catch up. Nick taught me what I needed to know about different types of investments but concentrated on mutual funds because I needed to keep my investments on the safe side given my age.
With the information Nick provided me over the next 6 months or so, that was enough for me to carry on my education in financial systems on my own. Nick moved on working at another depot closer to his home. I learned everything I could about the stock market and how mutual funds worked. I started to invest as much as possible in a variety of mutual funds carefully chosen. My multiple retirement accounts were growing over the years with the power of compounding. 12 years have gone by, and I found myself to be on track with my finances, due to my diligence and persistence. I didn’t give myself a choice. Yes, there were many setbacks in those 12 years, but I worked through them and continued to today with those same investments. It took me a long time to get out of my financial mess I was in. That’s one problem I no longer need to solve. My investments now are on auto pilot. I continue to invest to this day by dollar cost averaging in all my mutual funds and make periodic adjustments as the markets change.
Over the years, I found myself coaching others in personal finances and various type of investments in a group setting or as individual. As time went on for many years, I became more passionate about the idea of helping more people to succeed with their finances, because schools don’t teach “Financial Literacy”, Schools don’t even teach how to balance a checkbook much less financial literacy. I found myself compelled; I had to do something. I just didn’t know how, that was the missing link I had to figure out, how do I reach more people.
For the past 7 years, people kept on telling me I should start making You Tube videos, start an Instagram account, start a newsletter, just go on the internet and start blogging, announce your coaching ability on Facebook, make Tik Tok short videos about personal finance and investments. My head was spinning with all of this modern technology. Finally, after so many years of teaching finances in short form as a side note to my regular technical training I had to step up. I knew the time had finally arrived; I just didn’t know how or where start, so I jumped in the deep end. After a year or so of throwing ideas at the wall, nothing was sticking. Then I thought about starting a training course, but how? After reading a number of books and listening to different podcasts I was listening to an interview one day driving to work about life coaching I said to myself, hey now that’s an idea, but what do I know about personal development. Just because I counseled dozens of people over the past 40 years doesn’t qualify me to be a coach or a mentor. I didn’t qualify to coach personal development, I’m no psychologist. I don’t have any knowledge or a degree in this field. However, something kept on nudging me towards this coaching thing gnawing at back of my brain.
I said to myself what are the attributes that I possess? The only thing I could think of is, all I have is a lifetime of experiences, successes and a whole lot of failures. What to do and especially what not to do. Finally, with the help and encouragement of my students Shark House Financial Solutions was born. I now have the pleasure of working with individuals and families to thrive in this modern day confusing and frustrating, at times, financial world.
Through this website and my newsletters, I am hoping to reach as many people as possible that I can. Thank you for being here on this journey with me.