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I would first like to express my deepest gratitude to our clients, current and past. In the end, it is their kind pressure on me to help them find solutions to perfectly reasonable needs that has driven me to push the limits of whatever the envelope was. Without client pressures, I doubt that I would have done much with respect to goals-based wealth management. Admittedly, it was not clients – who would then have been clients of my employer – who pushed me to think of the need for wealth managers to think of tax-efficiency. There, I was compelled to move by academic literature and the obvious questions it raised. But the observation that traditional strategic asset allocation had serious limitations was directly suggested to me by clients who could not make sense of what their advisors were recommending. So, thank you, dear clients; you have indeed made me much better, and your pressure eventually led to the text within this book. What's next?

It also behooves me to thank you, our readers. Purchasing and reading this book is proof that the topic is important in your eyes, and that is already a great result. More importantly to me, I sincerely hope that you will allow me to achieve a crucial goal: making a difference and getting our clients – and yours if you are advisors – better served by an industry that is there to help them manage their wealth. Do not think that you have to copy the model I use to make my point. But please learn the principles behind it and then feel free to develop solutions that respect these principles and work even better in your own circumstances, whether you are a wealthy individual or family, or a professional wealth advisor.

I should also extend my thanks to the many authors who submitted articles to the Journal of Wealth Management and express my gratitude to Institutional Investor Journals. Authors, you have provided me with a unique opportunity to sit at the crossroads of many intellectual flows, and it has been a privilege. These many thoughts – quite a few of them ended up published as wonderful articles – inspired me to keep trying to innovate. Institutional Investor Journals also played a crucial role in the development of our industry by providing a forum where these thoughts could be shared: the Journal of Wealth Management. I want, therefore, to thank Gauri Goyal, who asked me to be the founding editor, and Allison Adams, who succeeded her, and with whom I have worked for the last ten years at least. The many members of our Advisory Board also deserve special thanks, as they have helped me discern those ideas that were worth exploring from those that were not. I should add the CFA Institute to those I thank in this section, particularly people like Stephen Horan, Charles Henneman, and too many others to name them all, but they know who they are, for their willingness to invite me to speak at too many CFA Society meetings for me to remember. Interactions with the attendance at these sessions also kept me driven to get better. Annie Wee, Cynthia Teong Boey Choo, and Joyce Lee, of the Wealth Management Institute in Singapore, also deserve special mention as they supported me in my endeavors to develop and share these thoughts, with a huge degree of faithfulness. Last but not least, Jos van Bommel and the Luxembourg School of Finance should also be noted, as they invited me to teach a class at the capstone event of the Executive Program in Wealth Management and thus fostered further research that resulted in quite a few of the insights that make up this book.

A number of people were kind enough to agree to review the manuscript and to offer comments. They were chosen among friends who neatly fell in two categories: several of them believed in the concept of goals-based wealth management, but others were openly skeptical. They all, however, provided very insightful and useful comments without which the text would be less interesting, quite a bit poorer, and much harder to read and follow. So thank you, in alphabetical order, to Thierry Brunel, Mark Cirilli, Vera Cvijetic-Petrovic Boissier, Kevin Irwin, Jean Karoubi, Mel Lagomasino, Jack Parham, Todd Pines, Kevin Prinsen, Vincent Worms, and Michael Zeuner.

I should obviously thank Wiley for their willingness to support and publish this text. Laura Gachko, senior editor, Digital Business Development, Professional Development, stands as the first person I should thank, as she was the one who negotiated the contract that led to this book. Judy Howarth, senior development editor, helped me manage the writing schedule, gave crucial feedback along the way, and captained the team as the book went from manuscript to published book. Finally, Tula Batanchiev, associate editor, Professional Development, was always there to make sure that everything ran smoothly, from designing and selecting a cover to setting up the website. I could not imagine working with a more professional and helpful team.

Last but not least, I must thank my wife of forty years and business partner of almost fifteen, Debbie. She went through numerous iterations of the manuscript with an eagle eye for typographical or grammatical errors, but, more importantly, for flow and even contents as well. She tolerated my “mental absence” while we were entertaining friends in our home in the south of France last summer, as I would only appear at meal time and spend the rest of the day holed up in my office working at the keyboard. Without her patience and understanding, I surely would not have met the deadline we had agreed to meet with Wiley & Sons.