Nurse offers guide to financial success.

• Author: Cohan, Peter
• Position: Business

Byline: Peter Cohan

When I think of nurses, their ability to give good financial advice is not the first thing that pops into mind. But the story of Ghana native Frank Adjei-Mensah opened the possibility that a nurse could be a source of good advice on finances.

His book, "The American Dream Declassified,'' argues that more education is not necessarily the answer to financial success. Instead, he argues that people need to create assets that will pay off in case their ability to work ends suddenly.

Mr. Adjei-Mensah came by his financial insights through life experience and research. As I learned from a Sept. 11 interview, he came to the U.S. in 2000 after majoring in law and sociology at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Ghana. He struggled for years before getting into the nursing field. In 2007, Mr. Adjei-Mensah married -- his wife's family is in Worcester -- and started nursing school. He graduated in 2009 and moved to Cincinnati to work for a psychiatric hospital. In 2010, he started researching his book.

As he said, "I talked to a lot of people -- doctors, nurses, nursing aides and other people not in the health field such as students who were engineers trying to become business folks. I read books like Napoleon Hill's "Think and Grow Rich,'' and Robert Kiyosaki's "Rich Dad, Poor Dad.'' I also watched Suze Orman on TV.''

Mr. Adjei-Mensah was trying to answer a basic question: What should people do?

"I realized that becoming financially successful is not that complicated,'' he said. "People who are financially successful are not the smartest guys in the room. I know a guy who is a doctor, a lawyer, and a pharmacist. He has all these degrees. He goes from job to job every single day. He is trying to insulate himself. If his legal practice goes down, he can do something else.''

Mr. Adjei-Mensah concluded that education has been oversold: "We are taught that education is the key to success -- but what...