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George D.
Kinder: Financial Planner
"When I married, my wife and I made a deal. First she would support me for two years, while I pursued my writing and artwork, and studied the soul. Then I would return the favor." After devoting two years to an epic poem, drawing and exhibiting in small shows, and dedicating himself to meditation and the study of world religions, "my two years were up. My wife claimed her half of the bargain. Again I faced the demand of earning money. The old suffering came back," he said. Like the clients George works with today, he found himself holding on "to a body of beliefs with such fierceness and misplaced loyalty that they block us from the experience and pursuit of freedom, often for years, sometimes for our whole life." At the urging of his mother -- "You’ve always been a whiz at math," she insisted -- George signed up for graduate accounting courses and was soon doing taxes "unhappily -- for professors I had known." Despite this, in 1975, George earned the Bronze Medal on the National Uniform Certified Public Accountant (CPA) exam in Massachusetts. He would go on to launch a tax advisory business that specialized in working with academic, medical, and mental health professionals and become the founding partner of a tax management and investment management firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Yet, success as a financial planner could not heal his conviction that "...spirit and art were split irreconcilably from job and work...When I turned down accounting positions with the national firms of Arthur Andersen and Coopers & Lybrand, I realized I was saying no to the usual way of doing tax work. I wanted to make something different of it. It wasn’t just numbers to me. I needed to make tax work human by knowing my clients as fellow human beings." These insights ultimately led to the creation of
"The Seven Stages of Money Maturity™, In 1991 he founded George D. Kinder Financial Services, Inc. to pursue his market studies and money management practice. He is also co-founder of The Nazrudin Project, an influential think-tank of national financial advisors exploring issues of spirituality and human dysfunction around money. Currently George has clients in many states and has offices in both Massachusetts and Hawaii. He has appeared on radio and television programs across the country on the subject of financial planning. His investment strategies have been featured in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Newsweek, Fortune Magazine and other national publications. He has spoken at national conferences for Charles Schwab & Co., Inc., the International Association of Financial Planners, the Social Investment Forum, the Institute of Certified Financial Planners and the National Association of Personal Financial Advisors. As a Buddhist teacher, George teaches weekly in Massachusetts or Hawaii, and leads five week-long silent meditation retreats a year. His book, The Seven Stages of Money Maturity, is published by Delacorte Press and also available in a Dell paperback edition. See our review: http://lists.webvalence.com/sites/reinventingretirement/Broadcast.D20000812.html and scroll down to the Book Site. A favorite quote of George Kinder's is this from William Blake, the eighteenth century English mystic poet and artist: He who binds to himself a joy Next Steps Advice from George Kinder: "There is another way of living with money, a way of both acknowledging money's useful roles, and also finding a way to connect with our most profound aspirations around money, our deepest ideals, our most difficult emotions, our darkest places, as well as our joys, putting it altogether and understanding what all of our humanness has to do with our relationship to money." Information on Seven Stages seminars: http://www.kinderinstitute.com/ Copyright
2006 2Young2Retire.com, All Rights Reserved
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George D. Kinder, 56, a fee-only certified financial
planner, grew up in Appalachia watching his hardworking attorney father struggle to make
money. So devastating was the memory of "the perfect picture of discomfort. His lips
were pursed, his face pinched, his back rigid..." that when George graduated from
Harvard in 1971 with a degree in English Literature, he was determined he wasn’t
going to sacrifice his soul "in any pursuit as unfulfilling as a
‘job.’" Instead, he would spend "the better part of the next decade
resisting and rejecting the idea of a career, setting aside my natural aptitudes in
financial affairs for a vain attempt to become an artist."