Most of today's top financial advisors-those who created the discipline-came to it by happenstance rather than design, émigrés from brokerages, insurance, investment banking, psychology, teaching, law, Haight-Ashbury, etc. This rich mix of backgrounds, disciplines, skills, talents and perspectives created what we've come to think of as "the real financial planner," the one who takes a holistic approach to planning. This kind of multilayered career may not appeal to many Wall Street salesmen. Even those who are now out of a job.

Obviously, not all dedicated planners have taken the eclectic path. Some knew what they wanted to do from the outset and only had to wait for the profession to catch up with them. For Stanley Breitbard, one of the 55 planners I discussed in my 1997 book Best Practices for Financial Advisors, financial planning was a logical progression from his B.A. in English literature and his MBA, both of which he received from the University of California at Berkeley. He was able to pursue his passion for learning about people and helping them to live a good life, as well as to get a financial education, all at a single firm where he spent 34 years.

Now, during his "retirement," he continues to pursue the passions he developed throughout his working life, especially financial education and financial literacy. In the early '80s, Breitbard created the personal financial planning specialty at Price Waterhouse, building a national practice with 15 offices and registering a Price Waterhouse affiliate with the Securities and Exchange Commission as an investment advisor.

The only other career he had considered was working in the family dry cleaning business in San Diego owned by his father and uncles. But one of the uncles talked him out of it, encouraging him to do something more creative. What has always interested me about Stan is the way he spent his working life exploring his two passions, financial planning and literature. He chose to become a certified public accountant, but he's also a James Joyce scholar who presented a paper on Ulysses at the International James Joyce Conference in 2007. I wondered how these two passions provided similar lessons and how he grew in each of them to become a full and fascinating person in ways he never expected.

I know that some CFPs do not believe that the CPAs have really been down in the trenches with them. But I've always found Breitbard to be an impeccable source for questions on taxes, on retirement-and certainly on the technical aspects of planning. I admire the way he was led by his curiosity and passions to fashion a life that has affected so many others. And the fact that while still at Berkeley he found his soul mate, his wife Ronda (the woman he still calls the most wonderful in the world). I also admire the way he allowed his life to unfurl, always looking for the next challenge.

In this way, he reminds me of another man, Roger Gibson, founder of Gibson Capital Management in Pittsburgh. Gibson once gave a speech at a Financial Planning Association retreat in which he talked about how his life had not really begun until he reached what he thought of as its lowest point: He had bought a large diamond as a 10-year anniversary gift for his wife and took her on vacation to Maine-where she told him she wanted a divorce. This divorce ate up his $300,000 nest egg and he was forced to sell his business partnership and set up office in his home (his assistant had quit).

Because he had nothing left, he could take lots of risks: starting over in business, becoming "Mr. Mom," to his two kids, earning a black belt in taekwondo, studying Buddhism and depth psychology, picking up his clarinet again.

Gibson took what seemed the tangled warp and woof of his life and wove them into a beautiful tapestry; he sorted through his strengths and his weaknesses, trusted his instincts, and faced tough decisions head on. He came out of it a better money manager, a better father, a better person and a better soul. Isn't this just the type of journey most of us wish to make of our lives?

Breitbard's life is different, yet the same. He explored similar territory but within a single marriage and working for a single employer. Stan grew up in San Diego, married his wife Ronda in 1962, got his MBA in 1963 and joined Price Waterhouse that same year. He spent the obligatory time in auditing and then was drawn to a specialty in taxes, particularly individual and family tax matters like estate planning, because he preferred to work with individuals rather than corporations.

The Big Eight accounting firms of the time were just beginning to develop specialties. International tax came first. "I didn't even see the words 'personal financial planning' at that time," Breitbard says. But brokers and agents and banks soon latched onto the idea. Bank of America had a division for personal financial planning in the late '70s, he says.

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!

But of course he's not out of the game. He says he's been thinking of what financial planners need to be doing today in the face of the financial crisis and the total loss of confidence in investing.

"Financial planners are going back to blocking and tackling," he says. "If we've just been skimming across the top of things, we need to go back to basics. Planners must be educating their clients. They should also go back to total planning, including all the basic areas of insurance, estate planning, retirement planning and even budgeting. You can't talk about investments in a vacuum. You have to talk about it in context."

Financial planners should be acting as their clients' second brain, he says. People who consider a Bernie Madoff-type investment "must have a rational thinker by their side," he says. "We need to keep clients on the straight path of rationality and not leave them to rely on college friends and relatives for financial advice." Breitbard said the alleged Madoff fraud reminded him of an incident he'd forgotten from the early 1990s. "We had a visit from a guy from Texas who managed a hedge fund that he wanted our clients to invest in."
Breitbard asked him, "What do you invest in?"

The hedge fund manager was offended. "That's the black box," he said. "That's our competitive edge." Breitbard said he was shocked. "That's the first time I'd ever encountered anything like that." When he taught personal finance to the Berkeley MBAs, he said some students were annoyed with him because he wasn't telling them investment secrets. "I'm amazed that people still think that someone has the Midas touch," he says.

Breitbard believes that financial planners should teach clients about the difference between saving and investing. "Even bright people don't know the difference," he says. "Saving means not spending, putting it aside for later. Investment means putting it to work in some growth opportunity." The two can be separated, he says. "If you save money by not spending it, you can wait and worry about investing later. Saving takes willpower and investing takes brain power." The most important lesson financial advisors can teach clients now is that saving is the way to achieve their goals.

And that following your passions, doing what you feel led to do, becomes the measure of a well-lived life, much more so than the assets in a big portfolio. No one can learn this all at once. But it's a matter listening, opening the doors, and taking one step at a time. A matter of slowly coming into your wisdom.

Mary Rowland can be reached at [email protected]. She has been a business and personal finance journalist for 30 years, a half dozen of them as a weekly columnist for the Sunday New York Times. She wrote a column called "Practice Points" for Bloomberg Wealth Manager for six years. She speaks regularly about money and values. Her six books include two written for financial advisors: Best Practices, and In Search of the Perfect Model.