Book Excerpt: The Rest of Your Life

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Like traditional financial advisers, life planners aren't licensed. Want to be one? Just hang out a shingle, or add LIFE PLANNER to a business card--which is what a lot of financial consultants are doing these days. Life planning is no longer on the fringes of the advisory industry; it has entered the mainstream. A recent Wall Street Journal story reported that such non--New Age firms as Citigroup, Wachovia and Ameriprise Financial, among others, have begun to add life-planning skills to their financial consultants' training sessions. The newspaper quoted a financial planner from a big firm: "We need to give clients a sense of security so that they are willing to share with us things they don't want to tell other people," adding that she sometimes "feels like Barbara Walters."

If there's a founding father of the legitimate lifeplanning movement, he's Jacob Needleman, a philosophy professor at San Francisco University who wrote a book called Money and the Meaning of Life, published in 1991. The book is a journey through the lessons of King Solomon, the moral and economic teachings of the early Christian church, and chock full of money-related references to everyone from the Donald to Dante. Needleman's aim is to get us to understand what lies beneath our love-hate relationship with money and the relentless quest to make and spend as much of it as we can, unaware of how it might be messing with our heads.

Needleman contends that money begins to tie us into emotional knots even as we're learning to tie our shoes. To illustrate, Needleman recounts a boyhood incident: he visits a rich kid in the neighborhood, whose playroom is filled with neatly arranged, shiny toys. Among them is an elaborate model train set--bridges, tunnels, a locomotive pulling a long line of gleaming cars. Young Jacob is beside himself with excitement--but he notices that the rich boy seems sad and disengaged. When Jacob returns home, he looks at his own cheap and mostly busted train set. At this moment two thoughts collide. One is how much he envies that kid; the other is how empty they both feel. Neither is a happy camper. How can money cut both ways?

Needleman's book proved an inspiration to a small group of financial planners, who in 1993 assembled a free-form think tank called the Nazrudin Project. Nazrudin was a legendary mystic who, in the words of the group's leading disciple, "upended people's blinkered, conventional ways of thinking and forced them to look at themselves anew." The Nazrudins began to get together for weekend bull sessions in pastoral settings, sitting around the campfire, debating their clients' financial bugaboos. Why does money make us nervous? Why do we lose love and friendships over it? Why do we work so hard to get it and then fritter it away? Why don't we spend it on things that matter? Oh, and by the way, what does matter?

The Nazrudins concluded that a truly sound plan, a retirement plan, say, can't be built simply around how much do I need?--a national obsession now that the baby boom has reached 60. The better question is: What will bring me satisfaction and joy, how and when can I get there--and what will all that cost me?