Little did we know that when Financial Advisor published Dick Wagner’s “Got Any Spare Change?” in last month’s April issue, it would be his final column.

A pioneer of the financial life planning movement, Dick was a truly original thinker. That was one of the reasons I asked him to write for our premier issue. He quickly became our editor-at-large and a regular contributor.

In his view, the financial planning profession was the only new profession conceived in several centuries. Lawyers, doctors and engineers had been offering their services since Shakespeare’s time. But it wasn’t until the 19th century and the advent of the industrial economy that money began to acquire the degree of importance it would assume in the 20th century.

As a young lawyer interested in making a difference, Dick quickly realized that the vast majority of Americans were woefully unprepared to deal with the issues and that a crying need for a new profession had emerged.

To him, the nuts and bolts of the business—saving and investing—were relatively simple and straightforward. But for the emerging group of affluent Americans that were spawned in the prosperity of the post-World War II era, money presented choices, opportunities and a set of problems previous generations never faced.

For Dick, it was the art of financial planning, not the science, that presented the more intractable and problematic issues. This is what fascinated him.

And the issues that captured his imagination resonated with many advisors trying to take the profession to the next level. Dick’s fellow explorers like Roy Diliberto, George Kinder and Mitch Anthony also made serious contributions to financial life planning, all of them realizing that achieving financial independence should be the beginning as much as the end of clients’ financial lives. Life means so much more than money. Shortly after Dick died, Mitch Anthony sent me the following note.

“What made Dick Wagner a seer is that he saw money unlike any human I have met or read in my life. His gift was that he had many lenses at his disposal; sometimes he pulled out the telescope and told us where money will lead us if we allowed it. Sometimes he pulled out his microscope and revealed the very nucleus. Sometimes it was the prism and we saw the beautiful colors contained within, and, occasionally he pulled out his kaleidoscope and showed us how confusing and confounding money could be. To quote him, ‘Money is tricky stuff.’

“If you are a student of financial planning (and every good practitioner is) you owe it to yourself to read Dick Wagner’s works, material that constitutes an original opus from a beautiful mind and an even lovelier soul. Nobody crystallized the manifold mysteries of money and said more with less words, better than Dick when he wrote, ‘There is more to money than just the math.’”

Thanks, Mitch. We can all agree on one thing. Dick Wagner truly made a difference.

Evan Simonoff
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