About Me

I was born in Colfax, Washington in 1955.  My parents were college students at Washington State University.  In 1958, my father received an exciting job offer from the University of Khartoum in the Sudan. We traveled from New York to Cairo, Egypt via ocean liner rather than airplane, because children under five didn't have to pay (my younger brother and I were both under five).

Two years later we moved from Khartoum to England, where my parents attended Oxford University. We became close friends with a young man in the Economics  Department at Oxford who was from India. He had a daughter my age. This Indian family moved upstairs from us and we lived as one family. That young man, Manmohan Singh, eventually became the Prime Minister of India from 2004 to 2014.

I returned to the United States in the summer of 1963, when I was almost 8. Since I had no memories of the U.S., it was as though I had arrived for the very first time. My parents were college professors; first in Indiana, then in Buffalo, New York. In 1968, my parents divorced. My mother returned to Africa, where she remarried and had more children. My father decided to teach at Simon Frasier University in British Columbia, Canada.

After high school in Buffalo, I went to McGill University in Montreal, Canada and the Sorbonne in Paris. I was a Rhodes Scholarship nominee at McGill in my final year. I didn't get the scholarship but I was accepted at Oxford University. As I was preparing for Oxford, my father died unexpectedly in January 1977 at the age of 41.

When I arrived at Oxford in October 1977, a letter was waiting for me from the administrator handling my father’s estate from Vancouver, B.C. The letter discussed the fact that my father’s life insurance had paid a woman he was briefly married to but divorced four years prior, but the administrator did not want to go through the trouble of pursuing the matter. I left Oxford that day, and arrived in Vancouver, B.C. a few  weeks later. Due to a complex web of disasters, my three younger siblings and I were all disinherited - due to incompetence in the life insurance industry.

In October of 1978, I entered the life insurance business in Seattle, Washington. As a friend of mine used to say, “I was on a mission from God.” My career in Seattle was launched as a response to the traumatic events that surrounded my father’s death and I am able to draw upon this experience to help reform the industry. These reforms are examined in detail on my “Activism” page.

Since 1978, I have been continuously involved in the financial services industry, with a growing roster of clients.