Price Waterhouse saw this area as an outgrowth of personal tax work. But the clients wanted more than tax, Breitbard says. They wanted succession planning and investment planning. Yet when CPAs were asked about these, they typically understood them from the perspective of which investments were taxable and which weren't. Fairly objective advice.
By the early '80s, however, the Big Eight firms were growing more serious about the subject, and Price Waterhouse tapped Breitbard in '83 to head its new specialty as the national director of personal financial planning. "We certainly weren't calling ourselves PFP before '83 because we didn't want to claim expertise," he says. "I was trying to understand what personal financial planning was and how a national firm would do this." Breitbard said he had a lot of questions, but he had to just dive in and start working on it.
He held the director position until 1995, when he retired at age 56, and the last three years he worked from New York. "I loved being in New York," Breitbard said. "Those three years were magical for Ronda and me." One of his final responsibilities was to bring out a new guide that would help educate the public: The Price Waterhouse Guide to Personal Financial Planning, which came out in 1995.
(Full disclosure: This book was written by my husband, Bob Casey.)
Breitbard fully expected to take another full-time position somewhere near his home in Los Angeles after leaving. "I didn't know what exactly," he said. "I thought I might work part time in consulting with CPA firms on how other firms interact with them."
Instead, like Gibson, Breitbard left the door open to see what might fly in, his lifelong passions intact: James Joyce, the improvement of people's financial literacy, travel, education, knowledge and his marriage.
Sometimes he can sound like a one-man band beating the drum against the evils of financial ignorance and how it ruins the lives of so many Americans. Just because you are an accountant or a businessman or a lawyer doesn't mean you know how to manage your personal finances, he says.
One of the first things he did after retirement was develop a program for teaching personal finance to students who were working on their MBAs. Stan says he was astounded that most of them didn't understand how a financial plan encompassed dreams and passions, that it included everything you want to accomplish in life along with a strategy to use your resources-human and financial-to achieve it. He taught Berkeley MBA students for seven years and "loved it," he says. Each course took him back to campus one day a week for six to eight weeks. "You don't earn a living doing that," he says. After seven years, "it became work and I was drifting away from the practice." The course should be taught by someone current in the business, he says.
In 1998, he co-founded the California Jump$tart Coalition (cajumpstart.org), which has recently celebrated its tenth anniversary. The coalition focuses on personal finance education for children and teenagers in school. I spoke at one of his meetings in Sacramento and was surprised to see hundreds of people there, all enthusiastic about boosting the financial literacy of children and teens.
Stan also formed a Los Angeles James Joyce reading group and acts as facilitator. That group has also celebrated its tenth anniversary in 2008. Meanwhile, he is also treasurer of his condo home owner association, a community of 300 units, and he and Ronda have welcomed four grandchildren between 2004 and 2008. Now that's a retirement!