My green thumb came only as a result of the mistakes
I made while learning to see things from the plant's
point of view.       
-H. Fred Dale

Financial planning's inception and growth is no accident. It has been the product of historic necessity, fair winds and the demands of our times. Folks need friends in the money business. Money is a sufficiently intrinsic part of modern society that we need educated professionals addressing it from the social cell perspective. Even in these times, most people cannot see the obvious connections between money and the forces that shape their lives. As the saying goes, "What do fish know of water?"

Financial planning has come into being in large part to help people understand these financial issues and make decisions appropriate for the lives they are living. Yet right now, financial planners are still using terms mostly generated by the field of macroeconomics. This could be compared to developing the field of psychology primarily using only the words of sociology and political science. As with psychologists, clients come to us one at a time with unique issues. We need words with perspectives on money and its relationship to individuals.

Part of the problem, we acknowledge, is that this profession did not arrive fully grown and matured. Rather, it has been slowly growing its garden of knowledge from seed. Frankly, this garden remains immature. Not only has it lacked the vital root structure of more established gardens, it has had to endure resistance from hostile forces and harsh conditions from its beginning. Powerful forces want us to look at our world their way. And a thoughtful and fertile vocabulary has been missing from our world.

I have an aspirational view of the financial planning profession. I believe it is special. Indeed, I am becoming ever more convinced that either it-or a logical, functional successor-will be the most important, authentic profession of the 21st century.

Accordingly, in my last Financial Advisor article, I called for us to develop and use new words for addressing issues from financial planning's unique perspective. I had just come to the astonishing realization that there is no English word to describe the relationship between an individual and money. Since it is my belief that financial planning's mission, meaning and purpose are grounded in that very relationship, I was shocked. Yet I finally understood why financial planning issues generated so many disconnects in so many dimensions.

For me it was a "flat rock" discovery. As a boy, some 8 years old, I enjoyed turning over rocks and stones to reveal the earth beneath teeming with bugs, worms and sundry creepy-crawlies. I did not know their names. Words are not so important to an 8 year old. But words become more important as we age. They allow us to name relationships beneath the surface, suggesting profound forces at work.

That's why political groups and businesses must generate unique language as part of their culture. In college, I could tell an individual's fraternity affiliation by his slang. Or consider the spontaneous language revolution in technology. Among many examples, we have "googling," "surfing," and "IMing." "Texting" and its lewd offspring "sexting" were not even gleams in Mr. Webster's eye for the first three quarters of my life. "Spam" was a fat, salty meat product with a disgusting odor. Etc.
Why is it that technology has generated so many words but financial planning has not?

In the last article, I asked whether we could build an authentic financial planning profession even with our insufficient words. To the critic's consternation, I did not offer a path or a cure or any particular words that would do the job. Frankly, I did not know of any. I had just recognized the issue.

That was then. This is now. In the meantime, I have given the issues considerable thought and concluded that this is a big damn deal, worthy of considerable attention.

First, let's ponder just what sorts of words actually convey relationships between humans and various sorts of nouns. Once you start looking, it turns out there are hundreds, if not thousands. Words like "family" do the job of showing a special relationship between individuals in the context of a common social institution. Likewise, consider "patient," "teacher," "teammate" or "client."
All of these connote authority, activity, function, timeliness and so forth in the context of relationship. Or take "friend" and "enemy," which communicate connection and feeling. "Clerk," "salesman," "athlete" and "student" speak to humans and human activities. We share difficult and nuanced concepts such as "love" through words such as "marriage" and "parent." But there are few words addressing our relationship with money.

The words we develop ought to have several particular qualities. There must be general agreement on their meaning. They should be simple, even if they convey complex concepts. Consider the words of the preceding paragraph. None are more than two syllables. They are all easy to say. Some focus on their subject matter, using related root words. Others have long-forgotten etymologies but are now commonly understood anyway. Finally, they invite us to explore.

Good new words take us to other good new words. Turning again to "family," we can seek significant variations such as "untraditional family," "family of origin," "extended family" and the like. "Family man" quickly fixes a relevant demographic to a married man with children. "Family atmosphere" sets dining expectations. The concepts tend to catch on quickly. Typically, they fulfill communications needs within social units. Or they generate new conversations. In their turn, they spawn other new words and enable exploratory exchange.

The important question is: How do such words come into being? In particular, how do words come into being to enable us to discuss what was hitherto unexplored?

For one, we can look to other languages, where some of the words we could use have functional synonyms. For example, I am told that Asian languages are more relational in nature, and that Native American languages also have the capacity for relational precision. I know enough about German to suspect that we might be well-served by gluing existing words together. For example, we could use linguistic mutations like "collmon" for issues involved with the financial aspects of higher education. Unattractive, but illustrative. Or perhaps "kidfin" could describe the wide-ranging financial implications of rearing children.

From there, we could develop shades of specificity to deal with child care, work/home conflicts, childhood financial education, money saving tips and so forth.

Perhaps more meaningfully, words could be created by using different sources. For example, Dickens, Shakespeare and the Bible have been fertile word sources. Since money is the second most addressed topic in the Bible and frequently appears in Shakespeare's works, these texts could be especially productive. New Testament parables seem particularly potent. "Eye of the needle issues" might describe the problems generated by financial abundance.

Other words can be generated by grafting appropriate language onto an established prefix or suffix. For example, "-logy" from the Latin "logia," is a catchall that combines with those words to indicate the names of their respective sciences, e.g. "psychology," "theology" and "sociology." For example, if we combine this technique with a Merriam-Webster template for "psychology," we get:

Fin·o·lo·gy
1. the science of money and behavior
2. the study of mind and behavior in
relation to money and the money forces
3. the theory or system of finology

Related Forms
fin·o·lo·gist

Would this word work for describing financial planning's garden of knowledge? Could it hold the complexities of money and all its manifestations within subject matters ranging from literature to theology to science to political science? Could it contain the complexities of modern life and issues grounded in money, including systemic instability, job unpredictability and notions of work, children, spouses, parents, education, risk management, investments, the CFP Board's famous "Appendix A," health, happiness and the meaning of life? Maybe.

Then we must ask: Why bother? Many reasons.

Simply put, our profession's progress is dramatically limited by the absence of words that can both communicate and enable important distinctions among financial concepts. Consider what has come from attempts to coin words for addressing emotional issues grounded in money. Twenty years ago, we had no words. Conversations were impossible. We could use terms from psychology or religion but we always needed to define them and explain our intent. Then when we did, it didn't really sound like financial planning.

When CFP George Kinder coined the phrase "life planning" in his book Seven Stages of Money Maturity in the '90s, he simultaneously opened vistas of creativity and expansion. Now we were able to develop concepts and applications. This was a very big deal. Today, the term "life planning" communicates something meaningful to almost everyone in financial planning.

Unfortunately, "life planning" contains a few terminological disconnects that have made it less than perfect. However, its shortcomings and the process for overcoming them are instructive to language development. For one, it did not confine its scope to the human/money relationship. Indeed, it was a huge land grab of a term. Obviously, "life planning" does not naturally limit itself to money but logically extends to all matters involving "life." What were its limits, if any? In fact, some people resented the term's implicit arrogance.

Soon, adventurous colleagues developed the antidote by coining the term "financial life planning." At least this confined the activity to something that engaged money. It prompted evocative conversations about the expansive aspects of the Kinder term along with meaningful discussions' about the word "financial" and what it added. Or not. Some thought that the term "financial planning" was enough-that "life planning" and "financial life planning" were nothing more than financial planning done right. Then we argued passionately (and in circles) about what is meant by the term "financial planning."

I thought none of these terms allowed us to look at money and how it affects us from the inside out-using psychological, sociological or spiritual perspectives. For many people, the money journey has to do with self-exploration and spiritual fulfillment. For others, money is highly toxic, harming their ability to function, even impairing their relationships with others.

In my mind, the issues clarified when I began to study Ken Wilber and his integral theories. The word "interior" especially captured the range of personal and cultural issues-those that could not be made subject to numerical analysis, objectification or quantification. However, "interior" is not a prescriptive term but a container. It encourages varieties of approaches. As such, it can recognize schools of thought, such as George Kinder's "life planning," without requiring that they apply to financial neuroses and self-destructive behaviors. It can also circumscribe the terrain being addressed by increasingly sophisticated financial therapists. Now we can talk about "innocent beliefs," "money scripts," "shopaholics" with exploration and understanding.

There are dozens, possibly hundreds of terms that should arise from financial planning. Remember, we work with numerators in a world obsessed with denominators. Financial planners are the world's foremost authorities on how macroeconomic realities affect the lives of individuals. Planners are "feet on the ground," as they say in the military. Mixing real world wisdom with substantial craft, we know things no one else knows.

This gives us a unique perspective that is not available to the ivory tower folks looking at statistics and reading filtered data. Literally no one else has our perspectives or concerns. When macroeconomic policies and products (like derivatives) end up weakening the financial health of regular people, exacerbating inflation, crippling local economies, causing currency fluctuations, costing jobs or otherwise harming the economy, the human reactions to these events need names. Warren Buffett called derivatives "weapons of mass destruction." But what was the internal experience of these bombs on the survivors? How will they strain people's financial resources, rendering them unable to do the jobs we anticipated when we helped them make financial planning decisions?

The stakes are high. We are asking people to make decisions that will impact their lives 40 or 50 years from now, and we need words for those sorts of decisions. These issues are there, under that rock. It is one thing for an 8-year-old to call mysterious underground life forms "bugs, worms and creepy-crawlies." It is another for a profession to do it. Without articulate distinctions, we cannot isolate issues, compare responses, take from the gardens of other disciplines or otherwise advance those parts of the financial planning profession that would allow us to look at the world through the eyes of individuals.

We need our words.

Richard B. Wagner, JD, CFP, is the principal of WorthLiving LLC, based in Denver. He is the 2003 recipient of the Financial Planning Association's P. Kemp Fain Jr. Award, which recognizes a member who has made outstanding contributions to the profession.