Clients can use Paul Lemon's book to map out a financial plan.
It wasn't long into his career as a financial planner that Paul Lemon noticed a disturbing trend among his clients. He calls it the "dance of suffering."
The typical way it would go is a client would pay him $5,000 to put together a financial plan, structure a portfolio and generally grease the skids for retirement. That part would go well enough.
But after the work was done, and the client's course set, Lemon was often dismayed to find that the plan he labored on had done nothing to change his clients' lives. They still worried about money. It could still cause them distress. For many clients, money was more of a burden than a resource.
"Some of my most miserable clients had just inherited over $20 million," he says. "The problem is they were in bondage to their money because they couldn't tell anybody. They led secret lives."
For Lemon, a CPA who sold his tax practice five years ago to become a fee-only CFP practitioner, the realization of how his clients related to money became yet another turning point in his career.
"I thought there surely had to be a better way to do this," he says.
On a basic level, Lemon became a so-called "life planner," a philosophy based on the principle that planners should be focused on helping their clients establish and work towards their life goals. Money remains integral, but as a means to an end, rather than the driving focus. Now, instead of just collecting a client's financial data, he spends ample time discussing their goals, aspirations and dreams.
For Lemon, however, it didn't end there.
He spent the next three years producing a book that he feels captures both the spiritual and practical aspects of financial planning in a ten-week program that clients can undertake with or without the assistance of a professional planner.
The book, Ten Weeks To Financial Awakening, isn't a typical do-it-yourself book. It consists of 705 pages and is almost two inches thick-textbook-like heft that could be intimidating to the casual reader.