R.I.P. Richard Wagner JD CFP®

Posted on April 4, 2017 by Dr. David Edward Marcinko MBA MEd CMP™

On the Life of “Dick” Wagner


By Rick Kahler CFP®

The financial planning profession lost one of its most significant figures this past week. Richard Wagner, my friend and mentor, died suddenly.

Dick, a longtime financial planner in Colorado, was one of the pioneers and thought leaders of personal financial planning. His visionary leadership and commentary were closely followed and highly respected by financial planners worldwide.

Dick’s influence on financial planning was profound. He was one of the early leaders to understand the emotional impact that money has on our lives and to believe that financial planning must include that emotional component in order to fully serve clients’ needs. We each have an individual relationship with money, which affects everyone in all facets of our lives. For this reason, Dick called money “the most powerful and pervasive secular force on the planet.”

He served as the President of the Institute of Certified Financial Planners and received the Financial Planning Association’s (FPA) highest honor, the P. Kemp Fain, Jr. He was a co-founder of the Nazrudin Project, a leaderless brain trust of 100 of the more forward-thinking planners, therapists, and coaches in financial planning. From this group emerged many FPA presidents, as well as scores of influential books and white papers. For its size, Nazrudin has had a disproportionate and continuing impact on the financial planning profession.

Dick also served on the founding board of the Financial Therapy Association. His keynote address at the group’s first conference eloquently laid the foundation for this embryonic movement of blending psychology and financial planning.

Dick’s life work, the beloved passion he carried for decades, was to see financial planning become a profession. In fact, he envisioned financial planning as the most important 21st century profession because of its focus on money. He challenged financial planners to give their best to their clients and their profession. Even further, he urged us to build an authentic profession—one he saw as dedicated to helping people manage intangible but essential functions, maintaining a responsibility to put clients’ interest first, and serving not only individuals but humanity and the greater good. One of Dick’s last contributions to the profession was the publication of the book he labored for 20 years to write, Financial Planning 3.0.

Anyone who knew Dick for more than a minute knew that he told it like it was—with gusto, clarity, and passion. He characteristically would sum up the essence of financial planning as:

“Save more, spend less, and don’t do anything stupid.”

Most importantly, I knew him as an immensely caring, passionate, wise, and conscientious soul. He was one of my valued mentors. The scope of his ideas and the depth of his creative vision challenged me to question my assumptions and expand my own views of what my chosen profession could become.

I had the privilege of spending many weekends with Dick as a member of a small group of financial planning pioneers who were trying to make sense of this union of emotions and money. I often equated listening to Dick’s visions of “what could be” to flying a commercial airliner at 45,000 feet. While he was soaring, I would spend most of my time trying to figure out if and where we could land the plane.

Wherever he may be now, I believe Dick is still soaring—once again, far higher and farther than those of us left behind. His passing leaves me shocked and saddened, with a sense of grief not yet eased by the gratitude I feel for having known him. The financial planning profession to which he devoted so much of his life was vastly enriched by his ideas and his work. 

Publisher’s Note:

Although I never personally met Dick, I do consider him a friend and colleague. We emailed and spoke on the phone, often. In fact, he contributed to the first edition of our book: Financial Planning Handbook For Physicians And Advisors; now in it’s fourth iteration: Comprehensive Financial Planning Strategies for Doctors …

Rest in peace my friend. Robert Pine said it well when he noted,

“What we have done for ourselves is soon forgotten but what we have done for others remains and is immortal.”

-Dr. David Marcinko MBA

Conclusion

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On Financial Therapy Rising

Posted on November 21, 2012 by Dr. David Edward Marcinko MBA MEd CMP™

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Uniting Financial Planning and Behavioral Psychology

By Rick Kahler MS CFP® ChFC CCIM www.KahlerFinancial.com

The driver of the van that was to take me from the University of Missouri to the St. Louis airport asked where I was from. When I said, “Rapid City” and we struck up a conversation about his childhood trip to the Sturgis Rally. At one point he asked me, “What were you doing visiting MU?”

A Topic at the Financial Therapy Association (FTA) Conference

There I explained I had attended the third annual Financial Therapy Association (FTA) Conference. There was a silence. Then he continued talking about his memories of visiting the Black Hills.

Bringing up the topic of financial therapy tends to leave people speechless. It isn’t a common term. Plus, it combines two topics that most people want to avoid: therapy and finances. Put them together, and you have a real conversation killer.

Fortunately, there was plenty of conversation for the 85 professionals and students at the three-day FTA conference. For those attending for the first time, it was a “coming home” experience.

Mental Health Needs

Financial therapy addresses a need that until recent years most financial and mental health professionals didn’t talk about or didn’t even know existed. It’s the unconscious and unspoken thoughts, beliefs, and feelings around all things financial. Certified Financial Planners® aren’t required to have training in even basic communication skills, much less the more complex fundamentals of psychology or neuroscience.

Likewise, therapists and psychologists aren’t taught to deal with money, either in working with clients or in managing their own businesses.

As a result, neither profession provides the tools to address clients’ problematic and often self-destructive beliefs and behaviors around money. Destructive behaviors around money usually aren’t about the money.

For this reason, giving people more information about how money, investing, or financial planning works isn’t enough.

Financial Psychology

The exploration of financial psychology or emotion and money isn’t new. Dr. Jacob Needleman and Olivia Mellan were among the mental health pioneers who began raising questions around the psychological side of money in the 1990’s. About the same time, two financial planners, George Kinder and Dick Wagner, co-founded a leaderless group of financial planners, coaches, and therapists called the Nazrudin project to explore the emotional side of money. The Nazrudin project, which still meets annually, spawned scores of books, courses, and organizations raising the awareness and skill level of financial professionals and therapists.

The Nazrudin project was the primary influence that gave me, along with others, the idea of uniting financial planning with experiential therapy. I began referring to it as financial therapy after hearing the term from therapist Bari Tessler.

Financial Therapy

Typically, financial therapy involves a client-centered financial planner (typically only compensated by fee for service), and a therapist or psychologist, that conjointly work with clients. In my experience, this process helps clients who are in some way financially stuck make significant progress.

Academia Required

Link: www.CertifiedMedicalPlanner.org

The one thing missing in the evolution of financial therapy until recently was the involvement of academia. For the first time, the FTA unites academics, therapists, and financial planners in a common pursuit of defining and developing the concept of financial therapy. This is essential if financial therapy is to become a profession.

It may be some time before we see practitioners with advanced degrees in financial therapy. Before that time comes, the FTA has a lot of work to do, including coming up with a scholarly definition of financial therapy.

Assessment

In the meantime, Jeff Zaslow, who reported on our first financial therapy workshop in 2003 for The Wall Street Journal, wrote that it “combines experiential therapy with nuts-and-bolts financial planning.” As we work to foster the emerging profession of financial therapy, that’s still an accurate and effective way to describe it.

Conclusion

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