Morningstar Advisor - August/September 2013 - (Page 12)

Advisor Profile The Simple Life Cuts a Path to Prosperity By Kate Stalter For Mark Zaifman, finances are only part of retirement planning. When people talk about the impact of personal finance books published in the past 25 years, you’ll often hear them mention Your Money or Your Life, by Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez. The book offers a blueprint for aligning finances with personal values. Its publication started a movement toward financial independence gained through simple living. Mark Zaifman makes no secret of its profound effect on him. He read the book in 1992, shortly after it was published and became a New York Times bestseller. Its principles— living within your means, balancing work with the things you love to do—now serve as the foundation for Spiritus Financial Planning, the Petaluma, Calif., investment advisory and wealth-management firm he founded in 2003. The firm’s holistic approach to financial planning is focused on a wide array of clients. “It was a monumental book that changed everything in my life,” he says. At the time, Zaifman had recently moved to Northern California from New Jersey and was working as an executive recruiter with a focus on software engineers. “In 1992, I set a goal that I would have enough money in the bank to get out of the corporate world 10 years later and be able to make a very modest income doing whatever I loved,” 12 Morningstar Advisor August/September 2013 he says. “I had no idea at the time it was going to be financial planning, but I knew I wanted the financial freedom to pursue whatever passion really made my heart sing.” Setting the Stage Zaifman grew up on the East Coast, the son of European immigrants. As is common in immigrant communities, his parents started small businesses to support the family. As a child, Zaifman had the job of counting the money at the end of the day. That spurred his interest in numbers and finance. A few years later, he used bar mitzvah gift money to open his first brokerage accounts. He earned a degree in tax accounting from Monmouth University in 1983 and eventually joined with three business partners to form Management Recruiters of Bridgewater. The New Jersey-based firm specialized in placing accountants, auditors, and other financial officers. After six years, he sold his partnership in the firm and with his new wife, Patricia, moved to California, where he shifted his focus to technology recruiting. By 2002, he was working for Texas Instruments and recruiting students at Stanford University. He didn’t forget his goal of becoming financially independent. That year, Zaifman and his wife had banked enough money that he was able to leave the corporate world. He had several career options at that point, but being a devotee of Your Money or Your Life, the financial-planning field grabbed his attention. It allowed him to use his accounting background and help people identify problem areas when it came to their relationship with money. “That phrase, ‘relationship with money,’ is so powerful, because a lot of people don’t even think they have a relationship with money,” he says. A New Path Rather than hang out a shingle and start looking for clients, Zaifman spent the first year doing Your Money or Your Life workshops in the Bay Area. His planning business grew out of these free events. Like many young firms, Spiritus had a slow ramp-up, though Zaifman was prepared for that, mentally and financially. “About 50% of my work was pro bono, because I needed to get the experience. I wanted to hone my skills and practice different methods of financial planning,” he says. “For the people who did pay, I charged very low fees, almost like a nonprofit or a credit union would charge.” Over the next few years, he gradually began raising rates. His planning techniques became more sophisticated and he started working with a higher-net-worth clientele.

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Morningstar Advisor - August/September 2013

Morningstar Advisor - August/September 2013
Contents
Contributors
Letter From the Editor
Under Pressure
Has Your View of Bonds Recently Changed?
The Simple Life Cuts a Path to Prosperity
How Extended Is Your Bond Fund?
A Bond Contrarian Scours the Globe for Value
Investments á la Carte
Investment Briefs
Bond Market Behemoths
Shopping in the Digital Age
Shopping in the Digital Age
Diverse Crowd
Motor City Meltdown
Bond Convergence
Corporates Are Fairly Valued, but Opportunities Will Arise
A Legend Still Pines for the Good Fight
Greener Pastures
Forecasting Market Bubbles and Crashes
Forecasting Market Bubbles and Crashes
Home-Court Advantage
Overcoming Technophobia
These Funds Are Counting on Undervalued Sectors
Our Favorite Mutual Funds
50 Most-Popular Equity ETFs
Undervalued Stocks With Wide Moats
What Price Advice?

Morningstar Advisor - August/September 2013