My real name is Colin Benjamin Coombs but everyone calls me Ben.  I was raised in a financially successful family.  My father, Sam, was a successful life insurance agent and agency manager.  I was born 1938 ten years after my closest brother, Huber -- who likes to be called Samm.  It is a long story of how that came to be.  I am sure you know what happened between Huber/Samm's birth in 1928 and mine in 1938.  I have one other even older brother, Sam, and a younger sister, Catherine.  All of them are living as of this date (2009) and my father lived one month short of his 89th birthday and my mother, Edith, lived to her 85th year.  So I come from a long lived family for its day.  This is a key financial planning fact.

Although the family was financially well off by the time I came along it had not started out that way.  My older brothers lived in a much different environment both financially and emotionally.  It was a very stressful and hard pressed environment in which they grew up as opposed to me.  Even though my younger sister, Catherine, and I had it much better than they did we still grew up with all of the money messages that come from the experiences of my mother and father and my brothers.

I was the first in the family to graduate from college; Occidental College a small liberal arts college in Los Angeles.  I obtained a BA degree in psychology and, not knowing what to do with myself afterward, I went to graduate school in business administration at UCLA.  During that time I got married to Judy Delaney.  Just as I am known by my middle name, Judy's real name is Sylvia.  It is another long story of how that came to be.  One of the messages I grew up with was that the “man of the house” had the responsibility to earn a living for the family.  The fact that Judy was working as a school teacher while I went to school didn’t sit well with me so I quit before getting my masters degree.  Again, I didn’t know what I wanted to do, so I took the easy way out and became a life insurance agent.  God moves in mysterious and wondrous ways so even though this decision led to a lot of employment changes and moving around for the next 15 years it eventually got me to a place of fulfillment in my employment.

My wife, Judy, and I have been married since 1960 and we have two sons - Kevin and Scott; Kevin was born in 1962 and Scott in 1965.  Kevin lives in Washington State with his wife, Minda, and two children, Connor and Julia. Scot lives in Ireland with his wife, Orla, and three children - Oisin, Nuala and Olivia - all good Irish names.  My wife was brought up in financially austere conditions.  Her father, George, died young from spinal meningitis.  Her mother, Sylvia - known as Sibs in her world and Cita within the family -- remarried a few years later to Ward known to all in the family as Papa.  Papa became a wonderful father to my wife and her sister, Katherine, and grandfather to our children.  Cita out lived Papa as well and died at age 94.  Judy had many of the same money messages as I did growing up.  Again these messages and the long lives in our family tree are important facts to consider in any financial and estate planning we do or have done.  Hopefully this brief biographical history will be useful in understanding much of what I have to share with you as you search and read through this website.  You will learn more about Cita, Papa and Sam in the topic section of the website entitled Stories.

I have been asked by some who have visited this website to state the lessons I have learned from my parents and siblings.  One of the primary lessons is that there is no such thing as an entitlement.  I know this flies in the face of most of what the world is teaching us today.  The world is going to learn this truth through much suffering and angst as all our entitlement programs come back to haunt us.  I also learned that what you have is not yours to keep -- remember you can't take it with you -- but to manage to its highest best use for the benefit of your family, heirs and society.  And finally, I learned that it may not be my fault but it is always my responsibility.  Responsibility means being able to respond.  All this can be summarized in one word: stewardship.   

While in the life insurance business I became, like my father, a Chartered Life Underwriter in 1966. CLU is the professional designation obtained by those life insurance agents who have a professional orientation to their work.  Later, after bouncing around the life insurance industry in various capacities, I learned about a brand new designation, CFP® or Certified Financial Planner ™, being offered by the College for Financial Planning.  My father had been an early adopter of the CLU designation in 1938 so when I learned that I could, if I hurried up, be in the first graduating class of the College for Financial Planning I jumped at the chance.

In 1973 I became a CFP® and three years later set up my own financial planning firm.  There were only 42 CFP®s in 1973 so it was a lonely but adventurous and exciting challenge to set up a firm to offer financial planning advice at that time.  You will remember that 1973/74 on through 1982 was an extremely difficult time financially in the United States and the world with the first worldwide oil shock and a significant recession and economic slump that lasted for almost 10 years.  As I write this we are going through another significant worldwide economic downturn (2009) that may well last as long as the slump we went through from 1973 to 1982.  All this served to reinforce the money messages my wife and I learned from our parents.

The firm I founded in 1976 is still in existence and operates under the name of Petra Financial Advisors, Inc.  It is now located in Colorado Springs, CO and has clients all over the United States.  In 1987 I brought in a partner, David S. Forbes, and sold to him in 2000.  Dave originally joined the firm in 1983 as an intern following a professional hockey career.  During the 24 years I was in business I advised clients through all sorts of financial and life events; many of them through their aging and their ultimate death. I am in contact with many of the others yet today and have enjoyed a long friendship with most of them as they travel through their senescence.  Recently I had the opportunity to attend a meeting of Petra's clients in Southern California and was excited to make contact with one of my earliest clients.  Wanda and her husband Steve became clients in 1973, even before I set up Petra Financial Advisors.  Steve died some years ago but Wanda is still a client today.  I lost my longest tenured client, Kay, three years ago when she died.  Kay and her husband, Dick, became a clients way back in my life insurance days in 1968.

As you can see I have had an opportunity to learn a lot during all of these years about the dynamics of our aging.  This learning has been reinforced and amplified by the experience of my father’s aging and death and that of my mother in law.  And now I am witnessing it in my own life and my wife’s life.  I hope that these experiences have given me some insights and wisdom that can be shared via this website with all of you.