I graduated from the College for Financial Planning in Denver in 1982, in one of the first classes — back when financial planning was barely a profession and the certification industry that grew up around it didn't exist yet. Over the four decades since, I've owned two tax practices. Built and ran an investment advisory firm. Held Wall Street broker licenses, a life insurance license, and worked every side of the table the industry has.
That matters because most people only see one side of the table. I've seen all of them. And what I saw, by 2008, didn't add up.
In the spring of 2008, I moved all my clients out of the markets. The research wasn't ambiguous — something was structurally wrong. By the fall, the market was falling apart. It didn't bottom until March 2009. Not one of my clients took losses in that crash.
That December I went to Washington to research the financial crisis. In the middle of all the confusion, the Securities and Exchange Commission made an attempt to take over the state-regulated life insurance industry. It was a political move by the Federal Government to control all the money in the retirement system. While I was sitting in the SEC chambers, the chairman walked out and announced the Madoff scam. Fifty billion dollars. I watched the federal government acknowledge, in real time, that it had no idea what was happening on its own watch.
That was the lightning bolt. I went home and wrote The Great Wall Street Retirement Scam. It came out in 2010. Since then, hundreds of lawsuits have been filed against 401(k) plans for exactly the fees and conflicts I wrote about. Attorneys have told me they used the research from the book in their cases.
The system isn't built to help you keep what you've built. It's built to keep your wealth visible — to the IRS, to creditors, to a Congress that hasn't decided yet how much of it they want.
There's a different posture available. It doesn't require leaving the country. It doesn't require exotic structures. It requires changing where your wealth lives jurisdictionally, not what it's invested in. That's the doctrine. That's the work. That's what this site, the books, the channel, and the Reading all point to.
