Find A Financial Life Planner
Guess what?
A new book from George Kinder is on the way!
George Kinder and Mary Rowland have teamed up to develop a new book for consumers about how to get their financial lives on track and to find financial freedom through Kinder’s life planning method.
The first half of the book will provide inspiration for readers and focus on work the reader can do for himself. This will be a sequel to The Seven Stages of Money Maturity, building on the groundwork Kinder laid in that 1999 bestseller.
The second half of the book will focus on how consumers can find an advisor to help them follow their dreams. This section will include details about what’s happened in financial services over the past several years, acknowledging that consumers may well be disgusted with the advice they have been given in the past.
It will look at changes in the advisor marketplace with the increase in both fee-only financial planners who use the fiduciary standard and in registered life planners who have been through the Kinder training program.
The book will detail relevant information on how the financial crisis and the financial reform bill changed Wall Street. It will also discuss the controversy over the fiduciary standard and why it is important for consumers that this issue moved to front and center stage. The book will have a subhead: “The best guide you’ll ever find to choosing a financial advisor.”
When asked what is prompting him to write another book, Kinder became very excited.
“We all live beneath our potential. For most of us, way beneath. Usually we have excuses, many of them about money: ‘I can’t afford to’ sums up most of them. The truth is we can’t afford not to live into our brilliance, our creativity, our integrity, our genius, our compassion. We have this one life and it is as critical for each individual as it is for our families, our communities and society as a whole, that we live that life to the fullness of our vitality and our potential.
Here we are going through another recession, another banking crisis, and the government is thinking the same old tired way: “let’s goose the economy with credit,” which we all know leads to inflation and cycles upon cycles of boom and bust. What if they tried something different? What if instead they inspired people to live their lives to the fullest, to their greatest potential? How much extraordinary energy, vitality and efficiency would be released? This is what Life Planning does.
We have been living in a fraudulent world around money, and we all know it. Our most common word for it, if we have a financial advisor, is “I like my advisor, but I don’t trust any of the others of them.” Of course most people’s trust is so low that they don’t even have a financial advisor. Both government and large corporations have often colluded in this fraud on the consumer. Why is it fraudulent?
We are at an extraordinary time around money, historical really, but the consumer does not quite know it, and certainly doesn’t yet believe it. We know how to deliver financial advice free of conflicts of interest. We know how to deliver inspiring financial advice efficiently and effectively to working class and middle income consumers as well as to the more affluent. We know how to tie financial advice to the most profound, and urgent dreams of our clients so that not an ounce of their potential need remain buried. We know how to advise the consumer in simple but elegant and powerful investment models that are not secret covers for high trading costs, high risk and ultimately low returns. We know how to give comprehensive and holistic financial advice. So why is the consumer not delighted with us?
I used to struggle to find a good cup of coffee in America. I know some of you scoff at Starbucks, or have other preferences. But as Starbucks started to appear on street corners everywhere, I learned how easy it was to get a great cup of coffee. Now everyone in America knows where they can find a great cup of coffee, but no one in America knows where to get great financial advice. What’s more important to people, a cup of coffee or living an inspired, free, clear and accomplished life around money? Surely the difference between good and bad financial advice is more critical to a healthy civilization than the difference between a good and bad cup of coffee.
That’s where the fraud exists. There is great financial advice available now all over the world. Why isn’t the government doing more to help the consumer identify it and find it, and why are the large corporations so laggard in delivering it? This book will change that. We will teach those who want to do the work themselves, how best to deliver their life dreams to themselves. And we will lead the others, who would love a helping hand, how to find the best financial advice in America and in the world.”
George will be collaborating on this project with long-time financial journalist Mary Rowland. “I’m thrilled to be working on this project with George,” Rowland said. “I took a workshop with him that really excited me. I see this project as a continuation of my own journey toward financial freedom.
George Kinder, often referred to as the father of the financial life planning movement, has written five previous books including Seven Stages of Money Maturity and Lighting the Torch, a textbook on the Life Planning process. He has been an accountant, a financial planner, an educator, as well as a poet and photographer. He leads workshops worldwide for advisors who want to bring each of their clients to the life of freedom that they most long for. Throughout he has been a free spirit, following his own dreams to a life in Hawaii and now in London. With his wife and two children, he divides his time between Massachusetts, Hana (Maui), and London.
Mary Rowland has been a journalist for 30 years, a half dozen of them as weekly columnist for the Sunday New York Times. She wrote a column on practice management for the Bloomberg Wealth Manager, a magazine for financial advisors, for seven years.
Her articles and essays have appeared in Fortune, Business Week, USA Today, Ladies’ Home Journal, Family Circle, Woman’s Day, and many other publications. She has written six books, two of them for financial advisors. She is news editor for the web site advisors4advisors and writes a regular column for FA Magazine. Rowland received a master of fine arts in fiction writing from Vermont College in 2002 and studies theology at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY. She has a B.A. and M.A. in Russian history.