How George Kinder Revolutionized the Financial Advice Business
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So if a client comes in and their assumption is that you're one of those untrustworthy, unscrupulous financial advisors, even if they've got that a little bit in their mind, they're going to be resistant to having a meaningful conversation with you.

Welcome to the Stay Wealthy Podcast. I'm your host, Taylor Schulte, and today I am joined by the one and only George Kinder. If you have ever thought to yourself, hey, this financial planning stuff feels pretty easy. I just buy some low-cost index funds, spend less, save more, tune up my insurance policies, get a basic estate plan done, and file my taxes each year. Why would I ever need to hire a financial planner? Now, if you're a financial planner,

Now, to be clear, this is not a pitch for hiring a financial planner, but the type of financial planning that George Kinder invented 30 years ago revolutionized how planning should be approached. And I think you'll enjoy stepping outside the typical financial advice bubble and learning about what George has coined as life planning.

Even if you never hire a financial life planner, there is one thing that I think every listener should go and do immediately after listening to today's episode.

Go to youstaywealthy.com forward slash 52 and download George's famous three questions. I'll have a link there for you to download them. Now, here's what you're going to do. You're going to open that PDF. You're going to print one copy for you and one copy for your spouse. And you're going to answer those three questions. Very simple questions. You're going to answer them individually.

Then break open a good bottle of wine or soda or whatever your thing is and share your answers with each other. I think you're going to find this exercise really, really eye-opening. Again, you can find a link to George's famous three questions along with the show notes by going to youstaywealthy.com forward slash 52.

There's really only one question that I could have imagined opening up this interview with, which is, George, why are you here today? And what would you like to accomplish?

Well, you're taking it right from our evoke process, aren't you? The life planning work that we do. And I'm here because I am passionate right at this moment about making a difference in the world. I have lived on this planet now for 71 years, Taylor, and I am more passionate and more engaged than I've ever been in the past.

So I appreciate your asking the question in that way. You know, what's interesting about that question is that it's the way we open

our life planning engagements. And the reason we open it with that is that it's a completely open-ended question, giving the entire interview over to the client, which is what it should be. Yeah. And we'll get into some of your other questions and more, but while we're on this one, like you said, I know that you like to begin all of your client meetings and you suggest that us financial professionals begin our meetings with that question. And I'll tell you what, like

Like I was kind of nervous to ask it just now. It can be a little awkward. It can create kind of some awkward silence sometimes. So why is it, you know, maybe you can expand a little bit more. Why is it that you like to lead with that question no matter how awkward it might feel? Well, more often than not, it feels more awkward to you.

than to the client. There's always this awkwardness in kind of a new relationship. So that's there no matter what. And the awkwardness inside of ourselves as financial advisors means that we've got some work to do to be better communicators. And the best communicator

is the best listener by far. In fact, the greatest communicators are the greatest listeners. So we want to set up in order to have a conversation that builds the client's trust

We want to set up a relationship right from the get-go where the client is beginning to intuit that it's really their meeting and that we are eager to hear from them, that we won't interrupt them, that we won't put our frame of investment advice on them. We want to know who they are and what they really want. And it's the only way that, you know, one of the big terms these days in financial advice is fiduciary.

And you can't be a fiduciary to the client unless you put them first. If you start off with all your investment strategies or just asking them a narrow question about retirement, it's your agenda, man. And they're going to read that.

And they're going to go, okay, it's his agenda. I'll just follow whatever he has to say. Let's talk about that a little bit more. So it sounds like you're taking a pretty strong stance here that it would be really hard to call yourself a fiduciary if you don't have some comprehensive planning, or maybe you'd even go as far as to say a life planning process in place, right?

Why is that? Why can't you be a fiduciary if you don't have some sort of life planning process in place? I think it's 100% life planning. Without life planning, you are not a fiduciary, just plain and simple.

You can't be because it is life planning that listens to who the client is and really genuinely puts them first in the meeting itself. The traditional definitions of fiduciary come really from our understanding of regulations, goes back to the, I'm sure it goes beyond this, but back to the Investment Advisor Act of 1940. Fiduciary is a huge issue right now, I think, in civilization. I think one of the problems is

with civilization right now is that none of the hierarchies of power that we see, none of the great corporations, none of the great governments has wisdom at the top and wisdom is not filtrating down through those hierarchies. And the reason is they don't place their constituents first, whether it's the profit motive or in a nonprofit, it's a particular point of view that comes first.

What is phenomenal here about life planning and financial advice is that we really are looking to do this, to actually put the client first. And when we do, the client trusts us in a way that they've never trusted financial advisors before.

So it builds your business. It builds confidence inside the client that they're going to in fact get what they want. Maybe before we go any further here, let's just kind of set the stage and maybe you can define for us what life planning is. A lot of our listeners are in retirement. Some of them work with financial advisors. Some of them don't. So maybe we can just talk about what is life planning? How can our listeners start to kind of wrap their head around what that is? And then we'll kind of dissect and dive deeper here in a minute. So life planning is,

There are two ways to think of it. One is that it's a financial planning approach that really does put the client first. And by that, I mean, creates the opportunity and the engagement with the client where the client is eager to share what's most meaningful in their life, what's most purposeful, who they would most want to be, what they would most like to do.

and that is authentic and where the relationship is real and trusted. So one way is to think of it as a whole financial planning process where ultimately the money that is invested and the retirement plan that is put in place, the tax strategies, all of that are geared toward, I mean, the whole objective is aiming at

to deliver the client into their dream of freedom or the most meaningful life, most exciting and passionate life they can imagine.

The second way of defining life planning sometimes is just as the initial process in a financial planning engagement. That is the process that gets to know the client. And again, in such a way that the client is eager to share who they are and what they want to come out of their life because they recognize, they understand that

that in order for us as advisors to make the best decisions we can make about their money, we need to know where they're going with it. For instance, if they're still in a job and they really don't like that job and we don't know that, there could be this huge curveball coming our way

that where they suddenly leave the work that they're in and all the ways that we've planned for them, saving and investing, all of the strategies we've used for putting the money away may be jeopardized. What would be an example or two that would come out of a life planning process from the client's point of view? What's an example of something that would come out of the life planning process versus somebody

a traditional financial advisor process where you come in, you bring your investment account statements in there, you hire the person and they manage your money. Henry David Thoreau talked about secret sorrows. And so one of the things that might come out are secret sorrows and then an application to them. Another term that we might use are secret aspirations.

Another term that you might use are the most meaningful things in life that we would never talk with anyone about, but we keep private to ourselves. So what happens is that in regard to all of those things, if you have a great relationship with your advisor, you're eager to share who you are and what you want to come out. What are the outcomes you want in your life?

And then what happens, let's say that one of those secret sorrows is that you don't have a great relationship with your six-year-old son. This is an example from one of the trainers that we had in the early days of life planning, one of the trainers that developed

he didn't have a great relationship with his six-year-old son. And what came, so that was revealed in the conversation. And part of what we do is we have inspiring questions and exercises that help a client to do it if they're not capable or willing to share with it in a personal conversation. So in any case, in this engagement, he revealed that. And

And our classic thing is, well, it'll improve with age or, you know, I'll get to that eventually. Or he's only six years old. You know, there are all kinds of excuses we use around the things that we care about the most. And so but what we do in life planning is that the advisor, a skilled life planner, will pick up.

on those secret aspirations, those depths of meaning, and those secret sorrows. And we'll put together an image of a life that is so inspiring to the client that they can't say no to it, that they are compelled to walk into it and just go, wow, this is how I've always wanted to live.

And so in this particular case, we portrayed a relationship with his son that was fabulous. And we also had a, it was, there was an issue about a relationship with his wife and there was something about creativity as well. So there were a number of flavors in the dream vision that we created. And he was so thrilled. He was so thrilled that there was new energy to actually make those things happen. But when it came down to actually doing the plan, you know, doing the financial planning piece, um,

What we crafted was something that gave him an additional 10 hours a week to really spend on these things that he really cared about. And so the financial planning issue was, well, is that 10 hours a week? How do I pay for that? You know, where does that come out of? What do I have to sacrifice to make that happen? And so we crafted a plan to give him the sense of security that

that he'd be able to do that. Now, it turns out, and this is true in almost every case, that he didn't need that security. His passion alone, the vitality that he got from actually living the life of meaning that he wanted to live, gave him so much more energy

that the 10 hours that he took away from work were more than made up for by his productivity in the rest of the time that he worked. How might a husband and wife, like I said, not all of our listeners work with financial professionals. So how might a husband and wife

go about injecting life planning into their financial plan if they've chosen not to hire a financial planner? And maybe this is a good place to talk about the three questions, but I think anybody can use the three questions in conversation with their family members. But is that where you would suggest starting? Where would somebody start? I would go immediately to the lifeplanningforyou.com website.

It has the three questions that you're referring to in it, but a lot, a lot more than that. So it has a lot of the exercises and it's got a lot of the ethos, a lot of the culture, a lot of the values there.

And it works a person through to their, what we call their torch, what their passion is. And couples can do it individually and then share what it is that they're passionate about. Then the second resource would be actually, I think the book, the Life Planning For You book, which has many stories of couples sharing.

and of how they work with each other or how they worked with an advisor in order to create a successful relationship. Because sometimes that can be scary. You're going off in one direction and your partner's going off in another. How do you do that? And the truth is, if you love each other, there is a way almost always comes out of that. And you're both

much happier because you're actually living the life that you're meant to live. And since we mentioned it, maybe you can share what the three questions are and how somebody might use those three questions to start to think about their own financial plan and life planning process. So you're meant to do them in order.

And so the first question is if you suddenly discover you have all the money that you need, maybe you win the lottery, I don't know, but you have all that you need for the rest of your life. You might not be as rich as Warren Buffett, but you've got all that you need. So the question is what would you do with your life? So just scribble down everything that comes to mind, all the fun things, all the things that you'd like to do. So that first question's all about money. You finish that question.

And once you've done that, the second question is more about time and meaning. And here, what happens is you go to the doctor and the doctor reveals that you have a rare ailment and you only have five to 10 years left to live. And you'll live good. I mean, it'll be a good life. You'll live as healthy as you feel right now. But at some point, five to 10 years from now, you're just going to keel over and there's going to be no

forewarning of that moment. So the question is, if you knew that you only had five to 10 years left to live, well, now what would you do with your life? What would change? What would shift? What would you dedicate yourself to? So that's the second question. You can see you go deeper with that question and often relationships become more important there, but it can be different for different people.

The third question is going to the doctor, and this time they really shock you because it turns out you've had undiagnosed an illness that has come to term, and you only have 24 hours left to live. So the question here is not what would you do with that time? The question is reflecting on your life and all the dreams that you'd had for the life that you have remaining. What did you miss?

What did you not get to do? And perhaps most important of all, who did you not get to be? And what's interesting, Taylor, is that it's in the answer to that third question that the most important elements of a life plan are most often discovered.

I'm sure you've heard this before. A lot of the people that I work with are sometimes overly technical, really analytical. Sometimes they just want the textbook answer to something. Should I do a Roth conversion this year? When should I take social security? And as I listened to you and I've studied a lot of your work and read a lot of your books, I understand how important this stuff is, but I can imagine pushback with a lot of people saying, I don't need any of this. Just...

I just want the answer. I want to move on with my life. Is it possible that some people just won't resonate with this approach to financial planning? Or do I need to take extreme ownership here and find a better way to deliver it? And maybe you have some recommendations for how I can inject it or how others can inject it into their own financial plan. I want to, there are two aspects here, I think, in terms of our clients' responses. One is,

how are they pre-programmed to think of a financial advisor? And the second is, you know, just psychologically, how controlling they might be about life or whatever things. And those are actually related. They're related questions because we mostly think of, if you look at trust surveys in society as to what

professions have the lowest trust level. I mean, the joke has always been it's used car salesmen, and they actually do come out pretty low and pretty near the bottom. But now we, of course, think politicians. But financial advisors are not much above politicians in terms of trust. And reporters are not much above financial advisors in terms of trust. So just an aside here to say, when you have your political system

distrusted. You have your systems basically of finance and investment and economics basically distrusted. And you have the news that you receive distrusted. I just want to say civilization is at a dangerous point.

And that's the topic of my latest book, as you know, and I know we'll probably have a chance to talk a little bit about that at the end. So our responsibility as financial advisors, if we are true fiduciaries and really care about our client, is to turn that around. So if a client comes in and their assumption is that you're one of those untrustworthy, unscrupulous financial advisors, even if they've got that a little bit in their mind, they're going to be resistant.

to having a meaningful conversation with you. And they will not only, even if they have it a little bit in their mind, they will resist having an authentic relationship with you. They will always be holding back something because there's a layer at which they don't trust you.

So we are kind of cursed with that. Even here, you're a fee-only advisor. Clearly, you've got a passion for life planning. There are a lot of things that you've done right as a certified financial planner, just lots of things that you've done right, where we all know the client should trust you more. But the fact is we're fighting against a current in society that's huge.

So that even the smallest amount of suspicion that they're even unconscious of can block them from having a real relationship with you. So that's one thing. And well, another thing there is in terms of their, their controlling, if they, sometimes people are extremely mathematical about their life and, and put everything in boxes and feel uncomfortable having a personal relationship period.

And you'll have trouble as well having this kind of situation. But if that's true, Taylor, the question that I would ask you would be, who are the most likely candidates to leave you as a financial advisor just after a market downturn? And I would argue that they're the ones that want yes and no answers, that want an analysis that's put in a box and you answer in a box.

Because if somehow in some frame that they have about how the market should behave and seeing how well the blue chips are behaving right now and how mediocre the rate of return of a diversified portfolio has been, they're more likely to not trust the reasons that you've given them in the past and leave. So in terms of a better way to deliver,

It's mainly about listening. And this is why you started the interview is so brilliant. Why are you here? What brings you here? What would you like to accomplish? And they might start off about their money.

and their 401k or a sale of stock or refinancing of their home or something like that. And you go, no, no, no. I mean, if we're really to work together for a while, what would you really like to have happen in your life as a consequence of our work? So you frame it so it's more about their life. And then you really listen and you keep asking anything else. And if you're a really good listener and you're empathic where they tell you something that's tough,

like how they're not that happy at work, or you're excited when they tell you about how much they love gardening or golf or saxophone or whatever it is, and they see that you're really there for them.

they're more likely to actually go down this route and begin to address the questions. George, I heard you mention in another interview that you put off one of your dreams for 20 years. And so I'm just kind of curious, what was that dream of yours? Why did you put it off? And maybe how would life planning have helped you pursue that dream earlier? Yeah, I would have done it just about right away. I suspect if I'd had a skillful

life planner with me and it's stunning to me because I have life planned myself all along. I've asked myself the three questions and

from the earliest time and really kept what I'm passionate about in the foreground of my attention and awareness. But what, but we fool ourselves and I did to myself and it's made me, I think a better life planner because I know some of the traps you can fall into when you think you're going to accomplish something. So I had a very unusual experience.

Passion, very unusual dream. I mean, I entered college as a math major. I'd gotten 800s on every math board I ever took and was really off the charts in terms of my skills there. But I...

found it not so meaningful in college. And I shifted. I went through from math into economics, which I also excelled at, and then found myself eventually moving to literature and having a passion as well about spiritual things. So I left college

college aware that I wanted to live a richly creative and spiritual life. And very soon realized that nobody was willing to pay me in spite of this, do what you love and the money will follow, that kind of message. I discovered quite quickly that no one would pay me for one of my poems. And

No one paid me for any of my meditations either. So the dream that I had, so I had to make a living. And so that's how I came to do taxes. And then I started to do financial planning and investment management was such a natural skill. It's such a...

a delightful profession to be in and to do because of the accuracy with which you can do it. The dream that I had came out of this other side of me, the creative side and the spiritual side. I was passionate about creating something that I called an illuminated manuscript. So I don't know if you're aware of those at all, but they had them in the Middle Ages. The most famous one comes out of Ireland. It's called the Book of Kells, but there were things called Books of Hours. And they had

kind of a spiritual poetry and then beautiful design. And that's really what I wanted to do. I wanted to do beautiful design and beautiful, deeply meaningful thought pieces. And I had that dream for 20 years. And it was absolutely at the center of what I wanted most to do and most to accomplish in my life. And I never did it.

I did it eventually. So, you know, why I didn't do it was, you know, well, I had to make, I had all the excuses. I have to make a living, I have to pay the mortgage. You know, what would my parents say? What would my friends say? Because this is a pretty weird dream. All of the kind of classic excuses.

But in fact, what happened when I finally came around to doing it, one of the reasons I did was one of my trainers in the programs that we give on life planning, one of the people who leads five-day trainings and has done some two-day trainings as well, said to me, cornered me and said, George, you know, I've seen now what your third question is, and you're not living your life plan. And you've got to walk the talk, man. I mean, otherwise, you know, there's some inauthenticity in what you're doing.

So I mean, I was appropriately shamed and became passionate about doing this. And in relatively short order, I finished poems. I put poems that I've been writing for years together and put, and I did photography rather than illumination drawings. In the early days, I did watercolors and ink washes. But here I did photography and I mixed it together with poetry and I put it in actually a political context. It was connected with the Hawaiian people and their land.

And I did a book of almost like an epic poem of 100 pages or so of poetry and photography. And what happened out of that, Taylor, was I got on fire. I went on a world tour. It was the first time I toured the world to talk about life planning. So rather than becoming a poet and a – I mean, I still am a poet and a photographer. But rather than that being –

All that I did, which was part of the fear in the life planning community at that time, I became even more passionate about life planning. I had much more energy and vitality than I'd ever had. Very cool. I really, really appreciate you opening up and sharing that with me. Through all the years that you've been practicing and studying and training other people on life planning, is there one story in particular that stands out to you? Just something that's just

like a profound result that's come out of the life planning process. And maybe it's not your personal story. Maybe it's somebody else who shared an encounter with you. Is there one story that sticks out to you that you'd like to share? Well, there is a story, but it's a little different from what you're thinking. And what I would like to say, first of all, is that

I want to pull back from the question just for a moment because every story is unique and is uniquely meaningful and brilliant and beautiful. And that's one of the great joys and delights of training people in the five-day training in particular that we do is that you see everybody come alive individually. They come alive. The training, everybody gets life planned and everybody's life planning someone else. And there's only 12 people in the group.

So you have an active role in delivering every single person into the life plan. And I can't say that any person's life plan is better or more remarkable than another. What is remarkable is that every single person leaves those five-day trainings, not only with the financial skills to business skills to deliver a business, but with the passion to

to live the life that they really want to live. And what's surprising is you'd think so many people would already be doing it, particularly people who are interested in this work. And what you discover is that every single person was holding themselves back

And the life planning process lifted them into that. That said, what I'd like to do is actually answer your question in a different way, which again refers to my newest book, the book on the golden civilization. And that is that we are now doing

things like this in what we call golden civilization conversations. And they're formatted, they're happening all over the world, and they're free, and their groups come together. And we've done this now on five continents. I've only been involved in about 40 of them, but there have been well over 100 that have occurred, and ongoing ones that happen again and again in a community. And one of these communities has done something that is just astonishing to me,

And that is that they've recognized this problem that I talked about earlier, about that there's no hierarchy of power out there that has wisdom at the top.

and that is delivering wisdom all the way down and that all of its people model that wisdom. I mean, if, you know, we think of ourselves as an entrepreneurial society, but how could that possibly be? We think of ourselves as innovative. How could that possibly be if our innovation is not delivering the wisdom and good heartedness that we have naturally inside of us out into the world? There's something wrong at the foundation.

And so what this group has done is they're now into their seventh meeting. And what they are doing is they are designing a manual for wisdom.

to be applied at all ages from age six to 96 and really focusing on each age in a different way. And then because a lot of them happen to have had a lot of experience in the corporate world in trainings and facilitations, they're going to put a particular focus on how do we do this in the corporate life, in institutional life? How do we make wisdom

And you mentioned your new book. It's called A Golden Civilization and the Map of Mindfulness. And you mentioned that you have this personal goal of solving the problems of our civilization in just one generation. Can you expand a little bit more on that? Yeah. I mean, it sounds just ludicrous, doesn't it? I mean, you know.

I first started this by proposing at my 50th high school reunion. I had a workshop there, gave a workshop there where I said, look, let's end war within a generation. Let's make it happen. How would we do it?

And so I thought, you know, I was just thinking, well, what would you do? It's like going to the moon. You know, you figure out all the different things that need to get done and then you just do it. So one of the beautiful things about life planning is that's really how life planning works. Most people have assumed that their vision for themselves, their most deeply meaningful vision isn't quite possible.

But when they get the support of a group and they get inspired by the vision, well, it happens for everybody. Everybody's vision comes alive and they become entrepreneurial in a way that's just so lovely and personal and relational and familial. So my thought was, what if we get groups together? And the whole notion of the book is let's create the most inspiring vision we can.

of a golden civilization. And if we all agree on that inspiring vision,

what can hold us back? And the notion is, you know, go out a thousand years and imagine that we're there and then look back at now and look at all the systems and structures that would get us there very quickly and look at all the systems and structures that wouldn't and immediately throw out the ones that wouldn't and really adapt and adopt and strengthen those that would. So I think with that kind of passion,

we can deliver a golden civilization into society and in a generation. And my book is an attempt to inspire people to change their mindset. And instead of feeling lethargic and overwhelmed and codependent around politics and all of that,

to realize that in a democracy, it's our responsibility and we can do it. We can make it happen if we gather together, create the vision and go at it. Great. And if somebody is interested in picking up this book and learning more, where do you suggest they go? Well, Amazon is a great place and they can look at, I mean, the website that we have for this and the conversations is called agoldincivilization.com. And that A is important, agoldincivilization.com.

And I should say as well that when you think about civilization, the problems we realize that there's a lack of kindness, a lack of empathy, a lack of wisdom.

but also there are structural issues around economics and democracy. And I, I approach both in the book and I, and I've tried to do it in ways that are astonishing that, and that are inspiring. Great. Well, we will link to everything in the show notes so people can find all the resources in the book that you shared today and all of your other books as well. And George, I really want to thank you for coming on the podcast today. You have done a tremendous amount for our industry over the last 30 years and

And I just want to publicly thank you for all the work that you've done and continue to do. And thank you for coming on today and sharing your message and your wisdom. My great pleasure, Taylor. Thank you so much.

Hey, it's me again. I just wanted to say thank you one more time for listening and remind you to please, please, please leave a quick review. If you're on an iPhone, leave a quick review on iTunes. If you're enjoying the show, I'm getting great feedback from listeners just like you. And I really want to keep the momentum going. So if you have a chance on your iPhone, leave a quick review on the Apple podcast app. And thank you so much in advance for all of your help and support.

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