Why I Write The Wealthspan Letter
I’ve spent more than 30 years helping people make financial decisions they only get one chance at. Over that time, one truth has become unavoidable:
Most people are using planning frameworks designed for a world that no longer exists —
and the cost of that mismatch is catastrophic.Our parents planned for 20–25 years of retirement.
My clients today may face 35–45 years… sometimes 50.
Yet the models, assumptions, and “rules of thumb” that guide most financial advice still belong to the era of short retirements, predictable markets, and slower change.Meanwhile, technology is accelerating everything — work, markets, health, risk, and the shocks that compound quietly in the background.
This creates a widening gap between:
the life people think they’re planning for,
and the life they are actually going to live.Inside that gap is where the real danger sits.
It’s where the four Wealthspan failure modes take root:· Running out of money too early
· Living small because fear replaces strategy
· Blowing up after one avoidable decision or shock
· Losing control of your financial life just when it matters most
These outcomes aren’t the result of bad people or bad behaviour.
They’re the predictable consequences of using yesterday’s tools to solve tomorrow’s problems.
I write The Wealthspan Letter to close that gap —
to help you plan the next 40–50 years with the clarity, evidence, and long-range thinking the future now demands.
My Work
I’m the creator of the WealthSpan™ framework — a way of thinking about money, longevity, and risk that matches the reality of the 100-year life.
Before WealthSpan existed, I spent decades building and advocating for something I believe in deeply: independent, evidence-based financial advice.
I co-founded the Profession of Independent Financial Advisers (PIFA), created the Gold Standard of Independence™, and helped establish some of Australia’s earliest truly conflict-free advisory practices.
I’ve written two books — Swimming With Sharks and Shattering the Crystal Ball Myth — and I built the Independent Planning-for-Results (IP4R) Method and the Retirement Resilience Forecaster, a probabilistic tool that helps people see how long their wealth may really last under real-world volatility.
But WealthSpan is the culmination of all of it.
It brings together:
longevity science
evidence-based investing
risk modelling
behavioural finance
decision architecture
and the lived experience of helping thousands of people plan decades into the future
into one coherent way of understanding the financial life ahead.
A Changing World Needs a Different Kind of Thinking
The systems that guided retirement for the last century were built for:
shorter lives
simpler families
fewer structures
steadier markets
predictable work
and a very different version of “risk”
Those systems are now outdated — not because anyone did anything wrong — but because the world has changed faster than the planning frameworks that sit beneath it.
I write The Wealthspan Letter because I believe people deserve a clearer, calmer, more rational way to think about the decades ahead.
What You’ll Find Here
This is where I explore the ideas shaping tomorrow’s financial landscape:
the 100-year life
WealthSpan™ planning
AI-era disruption
stochastic forecasting
life transitions
spending curves
longevity risk and opportunity
the fragility decade
and the psychology of long-horizon decision-making
No predictions.
No hype.
No products.
Just clear thinking.
If you want to prepare for a future that’s longer, more uncertain, and more full of possibility than any generation before us, I’m glad you’re here.
A Final Note
I’ve always believed financial advice isn’t about money — it’s about decisions.
Good ones.
Informed ones.
The kind that hold up across a life measured in decades, not years.
The Wealthspan Letter is my way of bringing that thinking to the public.
If you’d like to follow along as I map the forces shaping the next chapter of retirement, longevity, and wealth, I’d be delighted to have you as a subscriber.
— Daniel
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