Holistic wealth planning is the right idea: eight disciplines around one table (assets, real estate, insurance, legal, tax, giving, behavior, care), each owned by a credentialed professional who’s good at the job. After 33 years in financial services, I’ve watched that table work, and when it works, a family’s whole life gets better.

Now look around that table. Who owns the liability side of the balance sheet?

The leak

Most plans leak in the same place.

Terry Pratchett explained it better than any economist. In Men at Arms, his captain Sam Vimes works out why being poor is so expensive: a good pair of boots costs fifty dollars and lasts for years, while a ten-dollar pair leaks after a season or two. Over a decade, the poor man spends twice as much on boots and still has wet feet. Pratchett was writing about poverty, but the mechanism doesn’t stop at the poverty line. Interest is a recurring fee for not having capital in position. A household can earn $180,000 a year and pay that fee every month: to Visa, to the auto lender, to whoever financed the kitchen remodel.

Usually, no one does.

“My clients are a cut above this”

I’ve heard the objection in person: your clients aren’t the masses. For your A clients, that’s probably true. The leak hides in three other places.

The middle of your book. Household debt stands near $19.1 trillion, and nearly $1.3 trillion of it sits on credit cards at average rates of 22 to 24 percent. Roughly half of active credit card accounts carry a balance month to month. Those balances aren’t concentrated among the broke. They sit inside households with strong incomes, real monthly surplus, and nobody assigned to the liability side of their balance sheet.

The referrals you have no answer for. Every advisor gets the call: a client’s brother, a colleague’s daughter, good income, real debt, not enough investable assets to take on. Today the honest response is usually a polite no.

Your clients’ adult children. Cerulli reports that more than 70 percent of heirs are likely to fire or change advisors after inheriting, and that only a minority of investors keep their parents’ advisor at all. The counter-research is more interesting: heirs tend to stay when they already know and trust the advisor before the money moves. Knowing them is the hard part. You can’t build a relationship around assets they don’t have yet. You can build one around the debt they have now. The parents hold the assets; the kids hold the liabilities. The liability conversation puts you in the room a decade early, for a reason that has nothing to do with waiting on an inheritance.

Eight seats, one leak

Map the whole table. Here’s what impaired free cash flow (too little money left after the bills and the required payments) does to each discipline.

Three rows, up close

Start with asset management, because time is the one input money can’t buy back. A dollar sent to 24 percent interest in a client’s thirties was the cheapest compounding dollar of their life. The couple who spends that decade making minimum payments didn’t just pay interest. They missed the years their portfolio needed most.

Insurance runs quieter. Term life, disability, and umbrella coverage lose the monthly contest with required payments, so the family runs thin. The failure has a long tail: one premature death, one lawsuit, one diagnosis without coverage, and the fire sale begins. Underinsurance is how a single bad year becomes a multi-generational setback.

Estate planning follows the same pattern, and eldercare closes the loop. The household that spent three decades paying unproductive interest arrives at 70 without enough saved. The adult children absorb the financial pressure, and they usually absorb the habits too. That’s the quiet part of the heir statistic above: the next generation you’d like to retain is often carrying the same leak that drained their parents’ plan.

What liability management is, and what it isn’t

Liability management includes the deliberate elimination of unproductive interest, funded by the household’s own free cash flow, in a custom order built from their rates, balances, and stage of life. Unproductive interest is interest on debt whose financed asset doesn’t out-earn the cost of the capital. The 29.99 percent card qualifies. The 2.625 percent fixed mortgage usually doesn’t, and in a well-built plan it keeps its place, and the client learns why instead of being shamed for keeping it.

It matters just as much to say what this work isn’t. It isn’t debt settlement, consolidation, relief, or credit repair, and it isn’t the combined checking-and-mortgage systems sold in webinars. There are no new loans, no negotiations with lenders, no credit pull, and no product at the end of the conversation. We tested them.

Why has the liability seat stayed empty? It isn’t negligence. There’s no economic home for this work inside the AUM model or the commission model: it’s labor-intensive, behavioral, months-long work on accounts nobody bills against. The professions didn’t skip the liability side because it doesn’t matter. They skipped it because nobody gets paid to sit in that chair.

The return hiding in the liability column

To be fair, a dollar that retires debt is a dollar that didn’t land in a managed account this quarter, and paying off a balance spends liquidity while an investment keeps it. Both points are real. Both have answers. This work is sequenced behind reserves, not ahead of them, and the mass-affluent households we’re describing either have an emergency fund or build one first. The goal is appropriate leverage plus adequate liquidity, not payoff at all costs.

Retiring a 29.99 percent revolving balance is a 29.99 percent after-tax return with zero variance: no standard deviation, no sequence risk, no drawdown. The Sharpe ratio’s denominator is volatility, and a guaranteed return gives it nothing to punish. Card interest isn’t deductible, so the pre-tax equivalent is the APR divided by (1 minus the client’s marginal rate). At a 24 percent bracket: 29.99 ÷ 0.76 ≈ 39.5 percent. Check my arithmetic; it’s one line.

Put $100,000 of that debt in portfolio terms and it behaves like a $100,000 sleeve printing roughly 39 percent pre-tax equivalent, guaranteed. To get a client north of 25 percent anywhere else, you’d have to reach for concentrated single names, long options, lottery tickets. The research on those instruments (Bali, Cakici, and Whitelaw studied them as “stocks as lotteries”) finds they systematically underperform on a risk-adjusted basis. The shot at 25 percent is paid for with a worse expected outcome. Meanwhile, the client’s own balance sheet is offering a sure thing.

None of this belongs in your performance reporting, and that’s fine. Debt-payoff returns don’t go in a composite, and the Marketing Rule agrees. The claim is different and bigger: the scoreboard becomes household net worth. An 8 percent portfolio year and $100,000 of retired 30 percent debt move the same number, and the client attributes all of it to the advisor who orchestrated both. Vanguard has spent two decades documenting Advisor’s Alpha, the value advisors add beyond security selection. Coordinating the liability side is that idea’s natural extension.

What the numbers look like

The planning platform I work on publishes its aggregate results and updates them weekly. As of November 2026, members with a full plan show an average projected date reduction of 16 years and average projected lifetime interest saved of $217,000, with 65 percent of interest eliminated versus paying the minimums. Seeing a plan costs nothing.

Those figures are averages across members who completed a full plan, projected at plan creation, and completed plans skew toward bigger debts and bigger surpluses. That’s why I’d anchor on the 65 percent: a ratio resists the skew that one jumbo household can put into a dollar average.

Filling the seat

I’m a Certified Liability Advisor. I don’t manage assets, sell insurance, or practice law, and I don’t pay for referrals or accept payment for them. That’s deliberate: the work only holds up if the judgment behind it is clean, and the relationship stays yours.

If this article brought one household to mind (a client’s kid, the middle of your book, the referral you had no answer for), bring me that situation with no names attached. Five minutes will tell us both whether the seat is worth filling.

Holistic wealth planning is still the right idea. The table is full of good people. And every month the seat stays empty, the family buys another pair of ten-dollar boots.

Sources and disclosures

• Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Quarterly Report on Household Debt and Credit, Q3 2026: total household debt $19.1 trillion; credit card balances $1.28 trillion.

• Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Consumer Credit Card Market Report (2025): the share of accounts revolving a balance returned to the pre-pandemic level of about 50 percent.

• Federal Reserve, G.19 Consumer Credit: average APR on credit card accounts assessed interest, 22.36 percent (Q3 2026); new-offer APRs tracked near 24 percent (LendingTree, October 2026).

• Cerulli Associates, intergenerational planning research (“more than 70% of heirs are likely to fire or change financial advisors”). Cerulli estimates roughly $124 trillion will transfer to heirs and philanthropy through 2048.

• Financial Advisor Magazine (June 2023): heir-retention research finding heirs stay when a relationship precedes the transfer.

• Vanguard, Putting a Value on Your Value: Quantifying Advisor’s Alpha (Kinniry et al.).

• Bali, Cakici & Whitelaw, “Maxing Out: Stocks as Lotteries and the Cross-Section of Expected Returns,” Journal of Financial Economics (2011).

• Debt Done Date planning platform, published member averages, accessed November 9, 2026.

• Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms (1993), the Sam Vimes “Boots” theory.

CFP® and CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™ are certification marks owned by the Certified Financial Planner Board of Standards, Inc. ChFC® and CLU® are the property of The American College of Financial Services, which reserves sole rights to their use, and are used by permission.