James Whitfield

The story

James grew up in Spokane, the son of a railroad conductor and a school librarian. He joined the Navy out of high school because, he says, he wanted to see something other than wheat. He served nine years as a supply officer, including two deployments aboard the USS *Nimitz*, where he was responsible for provisioning five thousand people and learned that a plan which can't survive contact with reality isn't a plan.

He left the Navy in 2005, finished a finance degree on the GI Bill, and spent a decade at a national brokerage in Seattle. He grew uncomfortable with how much of the job was selling products rather than advising people, and in 2016 joined Meridian Trust to build a wealth-management practice that charges flat fees and sells nothing.

The moment he returns to is a meeting in 2019 with a widowed client in her seventies who had been sold an annuity she didn't understand by her previous advisor. It took James four months to unwind it. He now runs a free annual workshop for seniors on reading financial documents, which has been attended by over 600 people. He describes it as the most important thing his team does.

James and his wife Carol, a hospice chaplain, live in Southwest Portland. Their son is a Navy corpsman stationed in San Diego, which James mentions within roughly ninety seconds of meeting anyone.