Personal Finance
Your Money, or Your Life?
The promise of a more fulfilling approach to personal finance
by Nell Porter Brown
When financial planner George Kinder ’70 sat down with new clients, he cared little about Roth IRAs, index-fund yields, or which life insurance to buy. He wanted to know what turned them on. “Our job,” he asserts, “is to keep the flame of true desires alive.”
Photograph courtesy of the Kinder Institute
George Kinder
Make no mistake. Kinder is a keen mathematician and entrepreneurial moneyman—talents first revealed through a boyhood paper route: one brother, who didn’t like asking people for money, worked 30 days delivering the goods; then Kinder spent two collecting the cash. But he is far from a stereotypical number-cruncher. He meditates for a couple of hours every day and says nothing in life is as real as the passing of each moment in time. He is devoted to the ancient Greek philosophers and English literature. And he has read The Divine Comedy many times over; he finds the descent into hell before entering heaven appealing. Some would say Kinder has found his own paradise in Hana, a remote Hawaiian town of “lush jungles, beaches, waterfalls, rainbows, and indigenous people,” where he and his family have a second home. “Once I’d discovered it,” he says, “how could I not live there?”
This rich existence is the direct result of “life planning,” a growing movement within the financial-services industry that Kinder has pioneered and promoted for about 15 years. Inspired by the ideas in Money and the Meaning of Life, by philosopher Jacob Needleman ’56, the early life planners gathered in the 1990s through an informal think tank called the Nazrudin Project (cofounded by Kinder and named for the Sufi holy trickster). Kinder and the movement rated their own chapter in Lee Eisenberg’s 2006 bestseller, The Number, which described Kinder as a “gaunt, somewhat bookish fellow with wispy hair and wire-frame glasses...a financial planner beyond category.”
In essence, the movement aims not to connect clients with the typical commission-driven financial products and conventionally acceptable aims, but to meld their “deepest human aspirations for a life worth living” with rigorous financial goals. “Many of us are so used to our dreams being brushed off,” he explains. “If you say you’ve always wanted to play the guitar like Eric Clapton, for instance, many people will laugh and say, ‘Oh, yeah, you want to play like Clapton…Now, back to the real stuff—retirement, educating the kids, getting a house and a car.’ But in that case, the planner is doing a disservice by covering over the client’s deepest wishes to be creative.”
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