In The News: A Ten Step Route to Financial Planning

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Financial Advisor Magazine, February 2004. By Raymond Fazzi.

Clients can use Paul Lemon’s book to map out a financial plan.

It wasn’t long into his career as a financial planner that Paul Lemon noticed a disturbing trend among his clients. He calls it the “dance of suffering.”

The typical way it would go is a client would pay him $5,000 to put together a financial plan, structure a portfolio and generally grease the skids for retirement. That part would go well enough.

But after the work was done, and the client’s course set, Lemon was often dismayed to find that the plan he labored on had done nothing to change his clients’ lives. They still worried about money. It could still cause them distress. For many clients, money was more of a burden than a resource.

“Some of my most miserable clients had just inherited over $20 million,” he says. “The problem is they were in bondage to their money because they couldn’t tell anybody. They led secret lives.”

For Lemon, a CPA who sold his tax practice five years ago to become a fee-only CFP practitioner, the realization of how his clients related to money became yet another turning point in his career.

“I thought there surely had to be a better way to do this,” he says.

On a basic level, Lemon became a so-called “life planner,” a philosophy based on the principle that planners should be focused on helping their clients establish and work towards their life goals. Money remains integral, but as a means to an end, rather than the driving focus. Now, instead of just collecting a client’s financial data, he spends ample time discussing their goals, aspirations and dreams.

For Lemon, however, it didn’t end there.

He spent the next three years producing a book that he feels captures both the spiritual and practical aspects of financial planning in a ten-week program that clients can undertake with or without the assistance of a professional planner.

The book, Ten Weeks To Financial Awakening, isn’t a typical do-it-yourself book. It consists of 705 pages and is almost two inches thick—textbook-like heft that could be intimidating to the casual reader.

Among the weekly topics covered by the book are how to set up a budget, take stock of credit cards and debt, set up investments, decide on insurance and estate planning. Along the way, Lemon intermingles poetry, quotes and anecdotes with financial charts, questionnaires and worksheets.

The book itself is stuffed with worksheets, checklists, illustrations, essays by Lemon on subjects stretching from the philosophical to the meticulously financial and numerous quotations. Also included are four CDs, which provides readers with video and audio presentations by Lemon that take the reader through each step of the program, which requires the use of Quicken software.

It was a project that consumed much of Lemon’s life during the past three years. Aside from the hours spent working on it, Lemon spent $300,000 of his personal funds to publish it. That included hiring contractors to illustrate it, lay it out and produce it. He also hired a writing coach, and paid $50,000 for the rights to use screenshots of Quicken software in the book. He estimates that he rewrote the volume about 20 times.

Even after all that, Lemon is not counting on it being a best seller. The book is self-published, so it is not widely available in bookstores. He advertises on Quicken’s Web site, but most sales have come through his own site, at www.tenweeks.com. He’s sold about 300 books thus far, at a price of $79.

“It’s not one of those books you can sell at an airport that flies off the shelf,” he says. “I’ve surrendered to the fact that it may not sell. But I know what I did is the best that could be done.”

Lemon says his goal was to provide people with a way to become active participants in their financial planning, whether or not they have a professional helping them along the way. In the process, he hopes the book will provide a roadmap for those who can’t afford a planner themselves.
But he also sees the book filling another role: as a tool for financial planners. Lemon believes advisors can provide the book to clients as a way for them to become more engaged in the planning process, or to walk-ins who don’t have the income to use their services.

Lemon says the book partly grew out of his concern that clients are too detached from the process used to plan out their financial futures. Lemon says he too often felt like a doctor filling out a prescription, telling his patients to take a pill a day.

“Clients come to us and we give them a plan. But the plan is really kind of our plan,” he says. “We then give it to them in a nice binder and say, ‘OK, now you’re all better.’ But they’re not involved in the emotional nitty gritty of putting it together, so they don’t have ownership.”

Among the first to go through the program were Brian and Kathy Derry, a couple in Bayfield, Colo., who began seeking out a financial planner after Brian retired from his manufacturing management job in 2002. They volunteered to be among the first to use the program after contacting Lemon during their search.

They completed the program at the end of last year. It took them about six months, and they estimate about 100 hours, to get through the book. They also had several meetings with Lemon along the way.

“This is a comprehensive program that allows us to know where we stand,” Kathy Derry says. “This really felt very much like going back to night school for a three or four semester class. It was that level of work activity.”

Among the changes the Derry’s made by the time they were done was the reconfiguration of their portfolio from one chiefly made up of single stocks to one with a mix of stocks, index funds and bonds. They set up a family budget that they review monthly. They also decided to pay off their mortgage. “One of the things the book encouraged us to look at was risk versus return,” Brian Derry says, adding that getting rid of the mortgage was a “zero-risk” way of increasing monthly income.

Susan Bradley, a partner at Bradley and Young Wealth Management in West Palm Beach, Fla., recently began reviewing the book with an eye toward using it with her own clients.

Bradley, founder of the Sudden Money Institute, an educational center for new money recipients, says that the book is a way to establish some form of accountability for clients.

Bradley, an author herself who wrote Sudden Money in 2000, wasn’t surprised by the amount of money and resources Lemon put into his book.

“I think he was coming from a very deep belief and passion around this,” she says. “Paul’s a CPA and a planner, so he’s not a foreigner to money at all. He’s also a very thoughtful man, and couldn’t have put this together if he wasn’t.”

One question advisors have to ask, however, is whether their clients will be dedicated enough to do the work.

“I don’t think all my clients need it, certainly, because we’ve done a lot of work with them already,” she says. “Some people may have the patience. Some people may never complete it, but still get a lot from it.”

Lemon says he has a range of ways of using the book. For clients whose assets don’t merit them paying Lemon’s fees, he will suggest the book as a way to fill their needs. Lemon may hold a meeting with such clients to review the final results. For clients who still want to retain Lemon’s services, yet use the book, he charges an hourly fee instead of an annual retainer fee.

In selling the book directly to advisors, Lemon is offering a program called Ten Weeks Advisor, which offers networking, referrals and educational materials for advisors who want to use the book as part of their practice. Lemon has yet to sign anyone up for the program, which has annual fees starting at $500.

“It’s a way, especially for new advisors, to build their practices,” he says. “It gives you the ability to open the door to different kinds of clients.”