People often ask me why I gave up a successful corporate career to become a financial planner. It's a fair question, and for years I gave a fair, tidy answer. The real answer isn't tidy. It's a story about money, and about everything money turned out to be standing in for.
A Belief I Grew Up In
I grew up wealthy in Taiwan. My father started a business when I was born, and from age five to twenty-nine, I never had to think much about money. It was just there, the way air is there. The only real question in my future was whether I'd join the family business or go off on my own.
Then, when I was twenty-nine, a combination of recession and Taiwan's conflict with China took the business down. My parents had reinvested everything back into the company; they never imagined it could disappear. When it did, it took the family wealth with it. Overnight, the only relationship I'd ever had with money (abundant, assumed, unconscious) was gone, and a different one moved in to replace it.
Running With Fear
I took the first job I found, which was in corporate finance at a tech firm. I had never been excited about corporate finance. But I wasn't choosing a career; I took the first job because I was scared. I worked fourteen-hour days, seven days a week, because the exhaustion helped me ignore the fear that I felt.
My second child was born during the Great Recession of 2008. I remember sitting in a hospital chair the next day, laptop open on my knees, half-watching my wife sleep and half-clearing email. I took one day off. Then I went back to ten-hour workdays and called the next three weeks my paternity leave. At the time, I told myself this was what being responsible looked like. Looking back, I can see it for what it was: a man too afraid to stop moving long enough to feel anything.
The strange thing about that kind of fear is how well it disguises itself as virtue. I climbed. My blood pressure went up. My marriage thinned into something more like a roommate arrangement than a partnership. I missed most of my kids' milestones. And through all of it, I believed I was doing the responsible thing, because I had money again, and money meant the family was safe.
I wasn't safe. I was just busy enough not to notice I wasn't free.
The Question Nobody Had Asked Me
In 2009, I hired a financial planner, mostly because I didn't have the bandwidth left to manage my own finances. I didn't know yet that I'd hired a financial life planner, someone trained to ask what the money was actually for, not just how to grow it.
A few years in, she stopped reviewing my account statements one meeting and asked me a simple question: what was I actually working toward? I started to give her the answer I gave everyone: security, the kids' future, the usual list. She just waited. I remember the silence in that room more clearly than almost anything else from that decade. Eventually I said something I'd never said out loud before, not even to myself: I believe that to feel safe, I need money. To get money, I have to work constantly. To work constantly, I have to sacrifice everything else. I'd built that chain link by link and never slowed down to reconsider whether it was true.
It wasn't. Then she asked: if my life were to end now, what would I regret? I realized I would regret living a life driven by fear. Fear-built beliefs don't leave just because you've spotted them, but for the first time, I could see that I was the one holding the key to the cell I'd built for myself. That recognition took a few more years to take hold. It eventually led me to leave corporate in 2014 and become a financial life planner myself.
Where This Leaves Me
I still don't have this fully figured out. I still notice old fears showing up in smaller ways: in business decisions, in how tightly I hold my calendar, in moments with my own kids. The difference now is that I usually catch it faster, and I have tools, built the hard way, for asking whether the fear is telling me the truth.
This is the work I do with clients now: not just working on finances, but helping people notice which decisions are coming from old fears or beliefs, and which are coming from an actual, current want. Money is just the place where that question shows up most clearly because money is rarely just about money.
I'm still living this story. I expect I'll be adding chapters to it for a long time. This is where it stands so far.
