Lynn Hopewell, a former CIA officer
whose ideas pioneered the development of retirement planning software,
died on March 28 at Inova Fairfax Hospital in Virginia. He was 68 years
old.
An enthusiastic Civil War historian, Hopewell led a
kaleidoscopic life. As a teenager in Portsmouth, Va., Hopewell was an
all-state end who scored the winning touchdown in the state
championship game for Woodrow Wilson High School. He earned a
bachelor's degree in physics from Virginia Tech in 1960 and an M.B.A.
from Harvard Business School in 1968. He spent most of that decade
working as a communications engineer for the CIA in 40 different
countries.
After leaving the CIA, he spent 10 years as an
executive at several computer and telecommunications companies. In
1980, he entered the financial planning business, forming Hopewell
Rembert Advisors, where he spent 10 years before creating his own firm,
The Monitor Group, which he sold to Glenn Kautt in 1999.
In the 1980s, Hopewell wrote a series of articles
for Financial Planning Magazine that became the foundation for many
retirement planning software packages. In the 1990s, he served as
editor of the Journal of Financial Planning and was among the first
advisors to embrace the Monte Carlo simulator, a program designed to
show clients a range of different potential outcomes arising from their
investment decisions.
In retirement, Hopewell spent his time working on a book about the Civil War.
He is survived by his wife, Leslie Lindsay Hopewell
of Warrenton, Va., three sons, two stepchildren and his mother.