A Little About Me

I am a Certified Financial Planner™ here at Green Ocean Global Advisors, LLC in Lisbon, Portugal. Here we help people manage the complicated world of cross-border financial planning. I especially enjoy counseling people to discover, prioritize and then align their personal capital (money, time, energy and attention) with their values. Before my move to Portugal, I had my own financial planning business and have worked almost 30 years within the financial service industry. I first started out at Dean Witter which them merged with Morgan Stanley. Over the last 25 years I had my own financial planning business in Tampa, Florida.

How did I get to Portugal?

A little over four years ago my wife came home from work telling me that there was a job opportunity within her company to move to Lisbon, Portugal. We have always thought about the idea but were realistic about the opportunity of moving doesn’t always present itself. To make matters more cumbersome we would be deciding this during a time when the world seemed to be crashing all around us with the COVID scare.  

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There is always a reason to say no in life. We were comfortable and lived close to our families but the regret of not jumping at the opportunity was greater than the gravitational pull of what we knew. Within a year we packed out belongings, closed my financial planning business and moved to Portugal.  

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Moving during COVID was challenging enough but moving to a new country? That proved to be a much greater accomplishment than we realized. My wife has changed companies since then and is enjoying the opportunities that it provides. Our 16-year-old has established a new set of friends and discovering who they are from a whole new perspective. And me? At first, I was just managing the family team. Getting the groceries, trips to school and trying to get through the paperwork without a clue how to read Portuguese. As time passed, I realized that I missed working with people and especially within the financial planning setting. Luckily, I crossed paths with John McNertney and Green Ocean Global Advisors, LLC and it is here where I work helping mostly US expats manage their money within the confines of both the Portugues and US tax laws.

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