At a certain point in the financial planning process, the advisor needs to step back and ask, "What's the purpose of all of this?" So teaches George Kinder, founder of the Kinder Institute of Life Planning, in Littleton, Mass. Kinder is widely regarded as the leading thinker-the philosopher, if you will-behind the life planning movement.

Financial planners pride themselves on providing holistic, goals-based advice to their clients, not just selling investment products. Kinder prods them to help clients think deeper, identify the most important emotional and spiritual priorities in their lives, and ensure that their financial plans reflect those needs. He gave the profession a detailed, client-centered interview process, expressed by his acronym EVOKE, which stands for Exploration, Vision, Obstacles, Knowledge and Execution.

Embedded in that process are the three thematic questions for which Kinder is famous: 1) Imagine that you have all the money you need, now and in the future. How would you live your life? 2) You just found out that you have only five to 10 years to live. Will you change your life? How will you live it? 3) You just found out you only have 24 hours to live. What regrets do you have? Who did you not get to be?

Kinder developed EVOKE and the three questions through interactions with clients back in the early 1980s. Introduced to advisors around 2005, the EVOKE method gives them a cost-effective way to incorporate his life planning principles into their practices.

"That's where the rubber meets the road," says Mary Zimmerman, owner of PATH Financial Strategies and a registered life planner (RLP), the designation awarded to advisors who complete Kinder's courses and a six-month mentorship in life planning. "Now we have a way it can be practiced, a way for advisors to put it into their business models."

To date, almost 2,000 financial planners around the globe have completed the two-day Seven Stages of Money Maturity workshops, and close to 200 people have earned the RLP designation. Those are small numbers, but it makes Kinder's influence on the industry more remarkable because of the ways in which the planning profession-and the financial services industry at large-has gravitated to him and his way of thinking.

Kinder has taught life planning principles to large independent broker-dealers and RIA firms all over the country. Even giants like Citigroup have incorporated life planning principles into their marketing campaigns. In 2006, the firm rolled out a campaign with billboards, phone booths and scaffolds with slogans like "Don't be late for home," and "Live Richly."

GETTING IT STARTED

Kinder's pioneering book, The Seven Stages of Money Maturity, is the defining text of the life planning movement. Originally written for consumers in 1999, the book was an awakening for planners, discussing topics like spirituality and personal feelings, and delving into clients' desires at a depth that financial planners had never plumbed. "When this profession was analytical, statistical and cost-based, George stepped out into the side of things that nobody dared speak of. It was the notion that there was something more to financial planning than money," Zimmerman says. "He took a lot of risk coming out with his thoughts and publishing that book. He set himself up for a lot of ridicule."

Actually, the planning profession took Kinder's ideas quite seriously. Advisors often care very deeply about their clients, Kinder says, and are perplexed when they go back on a recommended asset allocation or neglect funding their estate plans or insurance policies. "What the book is about is the kinds of dilemmas that people face around money," he says. "How do we find maturity, so we can live a good, stable and vigorous life around money?" The theories in the book became the basis for the workshops, which he started in 1998. He began offering them as a run-up to the Financial Planning Association's national conferences a year later. The workshops became so popular that he founded the Kinder Institute of Life Planning in 1999, along with Susan Galvan, an educator and psychologist.

PRACTICAL PHILOSOPHIES

A second book, Lighting the Torch: The Kinder Method of Life Planning, co-written with Galvan, followed in 2006. In it, Kinder explains the EVOKE process.

Kinder had been a tax planner for seven years when he saw several of his clients get taken in by abusive sales practices involving limited partnerships and tax shelters in the early 1980s. That's when he migrated to financial planning, and began developing the client interviewing techniques that evolved into the life planning principles he teaches. "It's about listening to clients before leaping into solutions, and finding out from them what they care about most," he says. "Isn't that obvious? That's what we should be doing."