My mother kept the books for my father’s plumbing supply business on a spiral ledger at the kitchen table every Sunday night. When I was fourteen, she explained to me that paying an extra forty-two dollars a month against their second mortgage would save nine hundred dollars in interest over the life of the loan. I have been thinking about that math for forty-nine years.
I am a CPA and a CFP. I spent thirty years in fee-only financial planning in Wisconsin, working almost exclusively with what I call the second-tier affluent: people with $200,000 to $1.5 million in assets, most of it in a 401(k) and a house, who were too comfortable to qualify for free advice and too middle-American to get serious attention from the wealth management industry. These were my people. I came from them. I understood exactly what they were being sold and why most of it was wrong for them.
The first boss who shaped my thinking ran a fee-only practice in Madison. She charged by the hour. She sold nothing. She had a sign behind her desk that read: I get paid when you understand, not when you buy. I have carried that as a professional standard for thirty years. The sign is gone; she retired. The standard holds.
I have spent the better part of two decades writing about retirement and personal finance for national publications — a nine-year run at one of the country’s major retirement magazines, followed by columns and features for financial news outlets, long-form financial publications, and several of the serious personal finance websites that still know what a longread is. A piece I wrote in 2024 about what your financial advisor hopes you never Google was shared 140,000 times. I have received one cease-and-desist letter in my career, from an insurance company that did not like being named in connection with a product I described accurately. I consider that letter a credential.
I write long. A typical column of mine runs 1,400 to 2,000 words. I believe that a retired teacher in Kenosha who is trying to figure out whether to delay Social Security to seventy deserves the full explanation, not the 600-word version that sounds complete and leaves out the part that changes the answer.
I made a mistake in 2010 — held too much in cash and missed a portion of the recovery. I calculate it cost me somewhere between $28,000 and $40,000 in forgone growth. I mention this because a financial writer who has never made a financial mistake is either lying or hasn’t been paying attention.
I live in Sheboygan Falls, Wisconsin. Our house is paid off. Our lake cabin in Vilas County is paid off. My wife Nancy ran a gift shop on Main Street for twenty-two years. I consider the two paid-off properties among my finest achievements, and I am not shy about that.
I have a sign above my desk that I made myself with a wood-burning kit. It reads: The information exists. Go find it. That is, in six words, the complete theory of my professional life.