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As the chief executive and chief investment officer of Manchester Capital Management, Ted Cronin has big-dollar thoughts all day long. His firm, which employs CFPs and has offices in California, New York and Vermont, manages some $2 billion in assets.
But lessons about the limits of lucre that Cronin learned before he entered the business - when he worked in the Peace Corps in rural Thailand - remain central to the philosophy he shares with clients today. "Material wealth is nice to have, but it has little relationship to happiness," Cronin says.
As with many CFPs, the job experience Cronin gained before he started advising others significantly influences his practice. Many planners say the messages they deliver to clients about budgets, investing and setting priorities are based partly on lessons they learned at early jobs. Those jobs were as far afield as apartment rental manager, IRS agent, laborer in a lumberyard, locker-room attendant and computer programmer.
As a young mother, Nancy Seely- Butler, a CFP in Groton, Conn., initially made her living renting apartments. Her boss required her to drive to buildings statewide. She learned a great deal.
"It affected me in a lot ways," says Seely-Butler, who sold a successful financial planning business with $200aEUR 0/00million in client assets in 2007 and now runs a divorce consulting business. In real estate, Seely-Butler recalls, she would meet potential renters, hear about their purported financial situation and then pore through their data from credit checks. What she learned, she says, is that few people describe their finances accurately.
"It was amazing to see the difference in the way people handled their money," Seely-Butler recalls. "Some people saved from every paycheck and others seemed as if they had been in debt since they day they were born. It gave me a sense of reality." Observing the differences between what prospective renters presented and their creditworthiness on paper equipped her to "get to the heart of issues with individual clients," she says.
Seely-Butler also gained...