The Pasadena Financial Planner
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Find the best personal financial planning consultant for your family
The Pasadena Financial Planner is an experienced executive with a background in corporate business management, technology start-ups, financial modeling, investment management, economics, statistics, taxation, and accounting.
This article provides the biography of the Pasadena Financial Planner and explains how his expertise in comprehensive financial planning has developed over his career.
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Larry Russell, Managing Director
MBA — Stanford University, MA — Brandeis University, and BS — M.I.T.
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Lawrence Russell and Company Pasadena, California 91103
A California Registered Investment Adviser — Certificate 133101
KNOWLEDGE — OBJECTIVITY — HONESTY — CONFIDENTIALITY — DILIGENCE — EFFICIENCY — SATISFACTION
The Analytical Education of the Pasadena Financial Planner
The Pasadena Financial Planner is me, Larry Russell. I grew up in a swell little town in the Midwest. I was 6’ 6” tall by age 16, and my pants were always too short. In 1970, I left for college on a Greyhound bus with one box, two suitcases, and my longbow. I arrived in Cambridge, Massachusetts to study at MIT. Until I arrived, the fact that the longbow would be out of place had not occurred to me.
As a child growing up in the America’s endless rural heartland in the 1950s and 60s, I lacked a genuine appreciation for the word “metropolitan.” I did not realize that the edge of one “town” near Boston was not a field or pasture, but just another suburb. A modern Paul Revere would have been stuck in traffic all the way to Lexington and Concord. Upon reflection, my longbow seemed pretty useless. I quickly lost track of it and do not recall what happened to it.
At orientation in the old MIT gymnasium, various university dignitaries welcomed the incoming freshmen. One gentleman gave us the “look-to-your-left-look-to-your-right-one-of-you-won’t-be-here-in-four-years” speech. I got the point and decided that I would still be there in four years, which I was. While MIT’s core science and math curriculum is a required rite of passage, I found studying human behavior to be more interesting.
I studied politics and economics and picked up a BS from MIT and later an MA from Brandeis University. After Brandeis, I embarked upon a career in social science research. First, I conducted survey research and performed statistical analyses of corporate employee benefit programs at the private, non-profit National Manpower Institute in Washington, D.C. Then, I moved to Northern California to join the Institute for the Future, a think tank in Menlo Park.
An early understanding of the strengths and limitations of future-oriented financial planning tools
The Institute for the Future provided opportunities for me to apply my econometric, statistical, and political education to predictive, automated modeling projects. We used sophisticated projection methods to develop long range planning scenarios for Fortune 100 clients that incorporated financial, econometric, demographic, and technological factors.
Through my work experience at the Institute for the Future, I became convinced that the future is fundamentally unpredictable from the standpoint of forecasting any of its specifics. Additionally, however, I realized that the quality and comprehensiveness of any analytical projection model and its data will significantly affect its usefulness in developing insights about what might happen in the future.
I learned to appreciate the value of comprehensive and automated scenario planning. While specifics about the future cannot be predicted, computer modeling permits the evaluation of a range of internally consistent future projection scenarios. (And, when it comes to planning your personal lifetime finances, this projection modeling approach is a heck of a lot better than uninformed, random guessing and certainly better than naively trusting financial professionals who have financial interests that conflict with yours!)
While I did not expect my experience at the Institute for the Future to be useful 25 years later, the insights I gained have strongly shaped my approach to personal financial planning. During the past several years, I have designed and developed VeriPlan, which is a comprehensive and automated personal financial lifecycle planning application. I use VeriPlan with clients who want to develop a comprehensive picture of their financial affairs projected across their lifetimes. In addition, for do-it-yourselfers, I have also made VeriPlan available for licensing through one of my other websites, The Skilled Investor. Individuals can obtain a copy of VeriPlan for a very modest fee and do their own lifecyle personal financial planning.
In designing VeriPlan, I knew that this financial planning software tool must enable on detailed modeling and rapid development of lifecycle scenarios in a highly personalized financial context. Over the last two and one-half decades, computer resources have vastly increased. The average PC today can handle the intensive computational demands of VeriPlan and still produce results instantly after any change is made to your family’s financial projection model. Twenty-five years ago you had to line up with all the other nerds to use some hulking room-sized computer in a distant building. You had only one chance to run your program correctly, before you went to the back of the line to restart the cycle.
Most days that I worked at the Institute for the Future, I peddled my bicycle across the Stanford University campus and huffed and puffed up Sand Hill Road. My commute became much easier when I stopped halfway to attend Stanford Business School. At Stanford, I also developed expertise in business management and increased my knowledge of economics, finance, and investments.
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Serving clients throughout the greater Pasadena, California area including these cities: Altadena, Glendale, La Canada, Pasadena, Pomona, Rancho La Tuna Canyon, San Gabriel, San Marino, South Pasadena, Sunland, and Tujunga.
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