Growing up between Trenholm Park and Satchel Ford Elementary, James Wilson met just about everybody in Forest Acres. Attending Cardinal Newman on Forest Drive, Wilson branched out a little as a competitive high school student. Spending four years as an intense economics major at USC and keeping a room at the KA house, he spread out further still. Jumping into business for himself as a certified financial planner in 1982, 26–year–old Wilson’s continuing education got a little too real in the real world.

Financial planners were a rare breed 24 years ago, and a 26– year–old couldn’t claim the experience or fake the gray hairs requisite in financial planning business development. After a few years of living on air and more education and hard work, Wilson slowly surfaced as a money man with a respectable track record. Today he continues the push, the education, and the hard work, but now he is an investment manager at the corner of Devine and Queen Streets with a superior track record – and with a new building under construction next door.

Starting out as a sole practitioner in 1982, Wilson knew too well the stock market’s lackluster previous dozen years.

The year of the misreported Tet Offensive in South Vietnam, a resigned LBJ in the White House, a murdered MLK in Memphis, and a murdered RFK in Los Angeles, 1968 saw the start of a decline in stocks till the mid–70s when they held about half their mid–60’s value. As late as 1982, the Dow was still below 800. At that point, Wilson hung a shingle and surely stopped short of saying, “Buy stocks. After all, look how well they’ve done for a dozen years.”

Somehow the financial world began to turn for the better about the time Wilson struck out on his own. The 1981 Economic Recovery Tax Act had a positive impact, Fed Chairman Paul Volker and President Reagan pushed the supply side, and a phenomenal stretch of good fortune carried the stock market – until fall of 1987.

One day the bottom dropped out of stock values, and there was an afternoon panic. But Wilson continued to encourage clients to invest in equities, and the Dow topped 11,000 in recent years. During all this, Wilson was developing a client base, customers who paid him by the hour, not by any percentage of stock trades or insurance in force. He was SC’s first fee– only financial planner.

Today Wilson doesn’t even charge by the hour. He charges by the year, a retainer of sorts based on his estimation of the client and the client’s needs. Many requests for his services are denied because he’s not looking for new sources of headaches, people who can’t handle the vicissitudes of what they hope is an orderly world. But sometimes it gets a bit too chaotic and they lose their calm. The financial world can be orderly, actually, but to pull order out of chaos requires at least 24 years of financial planning experience and a superior track record to show for it.

At home Wilson is surrounded by his wife and two teenaged children. Wife, Cathy Wilson, and her partner, Margarite Carlisle, own and operate the Original Pancake House in Trenholm Plaza and in another two locations in Charlotte.

Wilson’s book he is co–authoring a book with financial journalist Bob Clark of Santa Fe, soon to come out under the title Last Chance . The baby boomers are approaching their last chance for successful retirement and estate planning. Anyone at a healthy 50 runs a 20% chance of reaching 100, possibly long after the money runs out.

Wilson is a cautious, seasoned 50–year–old optimist. He knows that even without strategic stock picking, if a dollar went into the Standard & Poor’s 500 index in 1926, by 2004 that dollar became $2,535 in total returns. With a little strategic stock picking, a dollar invested in a fund of small capitalization value stocks in 1927 came out in 2004 as $40,095. It happens.

James Wilson