Goals-Based Wealth Management: An Integrated and Practical Approach to Changing the Structure of Wealth Advisory Practices

Introduction

The first book I wrote on the topic of Integrated Wealth Management was published in 2002, with a revised edition in 2006.¹ In truth, it was a textbook whose audience turned out to be chiefly comprised of students of the industry. One day, I actually told a friend who had asked me to sign a copy he had just bought that the best use I could think of for the book was as a means of propping up a table that had one leg shorter than the other three. Another joke I probably overused was that it should be prescribed to people who had trouble sleeping!

Clearly, I only half meant those jokes, as it had taken me quite a bit more than a year to write the book and I had poured everything I knew—or knew of—into the effort. I was quite pleased (and proud) of the end product. I saw it at the time as a bit of a reference book to which one could go to see not only what one person (me) thought about a particular issue, but, probably more importantly, what the current leading thinkers in the industry thought. I received some praise for it, and it was mentioned as a reason behind an award I received from the CFA Institute in 2011, which is quite close to my heart. Therefore, I still look back on the effort as both useful and quite worthwhile. With the second edition nearly nine years old, I could simply have endeavored to bring the text up-to-date, called it a third edition, and left it at that.

Yet, I decided to take a completely different route. I decided that the experience—quite ...