Origin story
My grandfather was a minister who was prescribed rest. He moved his family to Texas. My father had a childhood illness that shortened one leg. His family moved from Minnesota to Tampa so he could walk more easily year-round. Neither of them fixed the person. They changed the conditions.
That three-generation pattern—changing conditions rather than fixing the person—is the structural prologue of everything I do. I didn't recognize it as a pattern until I'd made my own version of the same move, relocating my family from Florida to Portugal, making every expensive mistake along the way, and then spending years figuring out why the mistakes happened.
The answer wasn't lack of information. We had plenty. The answer was that our best qualities—my thoroughness, my strategic planning, my protective instincts as a parent—had degraded into resistance patterns that impersonated wisdom. We were stuck at a threshold we'd already decided to cross, held there by strengths that had put on disguises.
That discovery became the framework. The framework became the practice. The practice became three books.
What I do now
I'm a cross-border financial planner based in Sintra, outside Lisbon. My practice serves Americans navigating the US-Portugal financial corridor—one of the most complex cross-border transitions you can make, involving dual tax systems, currency risk, healthcare coordination, estate planning across jurisdictions, and the behavioral complexity of building a life in a new country.
I also teach financial literacy at a Portuguese high school, where I get to watch sixteen-year-olds encounter concepts about money and identity for the first time—before the degradation arc has had time to do its work.
My intellectual influences include Rory Sutherland (behavioral economics and the value of the unmeasurable), Herminia Ibarra (identity follows action), and the growing body of research on how genuine expertise calcifies into invisible constraint. The framework sits at the intersection of financial planning, behavioral economics, and identity research—a territory that no single field owns.
Credentials
The CFP® is the standard credential for comprehensive financial planning. The CBDA® reflects expertise in blockchain, cryptocurrencies, and digital assets—an increasingly relevant dimension of cross-border financial planning as clients navigate digital asset taxation, custody, and compliance across jurisdictions.
I'm an author of three books built on the threshold crossing framework. The Life Arbitrage: Permission to Have Dessert applies the framework to people in transition and publishes June 15, 2026. The Strength Trap (for coaches and therapists) and The Second Clock (for financial planners) are currently in development.
The Portugal reframe
Portugal is where I built this. It's not where it ends.
The US-Portugal corridor was my proving ground. The degradation arc, the Five Disguises, the buried decision—I discovered all of them working with people making one of the hardest financial transitions you can make. But the framework applies everywhere someone is stuck at a threshold they've already decided to cross.
Career pivots, retirement transitions, entrepreneurial leaps, family restructuring, geographic repatriation—the disguises operate the same way in every case, because the degradation arc is a human pattern, not a geographic one.
Explore the full framework