Books
We have published four books with Wiley—three in The Value of Debt series and a fourth on the future of money. Each was written to be evergreen, yet together they form building blocks of a larger intellectual journey.
At their core, they explore timeless questions: What is money? What is risk-free? What is risky? And what is the optimal quantity of money? They ask whether borrowing is inherently dangerous, or whether—under the right conditions—it can actually reduce risk.
On this page, we share an executive recap of each book: what it set out to prove, what still resonates, what we would change, and a hidden gem that foreshadows the next step in the evolution toward Balance Sheet Architecture™.
New York Times: Best Seller | USA Today: Best Seller | Apple: Featured "A New Year, New You" | Wealthmangement.com: 10 Best Business Books | Forbes: "Get your hand on the book" | Nominated: McKinsey / Financial Times Book of the Year
The Value of Debt® in One Table: How the Quantity of Money Shapes Outcomes
The original Value of Debt® project set out to build a conceptual bridge between corporate finance and personal finance. It is easy to prove that leverage can raise expected returns; it is also easy to show that borrowing can lower taxes. The harder and more important question is about outcomes: how does debt affect an investor’s probability of meeting a stated goal over time?
The working hypothesis was provocative but testable: if leverage can raise expected returns, can prudent, well-structured leverage also reduce risk when risk is measured as the chance of failing to fund a goal? Point-in-time models will always show higher volatility with leverage. Most households, however, experience “risk” as the probability of running out of money in advanced age. That is the risk that matters.
To examine this, The Value of Debt in Retirement analyzed every rolling 30-year period from 1946–2013 (39 periods), across ten withdrawal rates and five portfolio compositions, including one levered and one unlevered household. This yielded 100 portfolio/withdrawal combinations evaluated over 39 periods—3,900 observations in total—summarized in a single table of success probabilities (portfolios down the rows, withdrawal rates across the columns). I am grateful to Professor Charles Cuny (Washington University in St. Louis) for his collaboration on this initial study.
The initial finding is simple and intuitive: having more deployable dollars at adverse times consistently improves retirement outcomes. The full details of the study are in the book; while the testing was extensive, it was limited by academic standards and used only a single, randomly assigned leverage ratio. That limitation sparked more than a decade of further analysis. The deeper insight is that one can continuously optimize the quantity of money during both accumulation and retirement—through sequencing (build the global equity base first), through liquidity management (maintain a risk-free buffer sized to the goal), and through disciplined use of low-cost, positive-spread debt. Those ideas evolved into Spiral Theory™, Outcome-Based Planning, and Balance Sheet Architecture™.
Context matters. When these books were published, most advisors did not advise on debt at all. Banks originated loans; advisors managed portfolios; popular punditry equated “debt-free” with “financial freedom.” There was little distinction between good and bad debt, no common language for structural versus strategic debt, and almost no study of how financing choices affect outcome probabilities. Much of that remains true today. The framework here is an attempt to change the conversation: from “does debt raise returns?” to “can financing design, used prudently, raise the probability of achieving the outcome you actually care about?”
The four books are stepping stones that culminate in Spiral Theory. Spiral Theory is outcome-based financial planning. Instead of accepting unusual results—like an “80% chance” you won’t run out of money or a 20% chance of ending with excess—it reframes money as a controllable variable.
Traditional planning is like setting autopilot for New York and landing somewhere on the East Coast. Spiral Theory™ changes that. It allows you to design plans to any level of confidence—even 99.99685%.
The Value of Debt
Thousands of preorders made this book an instant New York Times and USA Today best seller. Translated into multiple languages (including Thai and Japanese) and still the most purchased in the series, it stands the test of time and endures as the foundation for applying corporate finance principles to individuals..
The Value of Debt (2013)
Author's perspective
Key Idea
This book introduced a holistic approach to debt, teaching individuals to think more like CFOs. While people are not companies, we can learn from the disciplined decisions corporations make about capital structure. The core message: debt is not simply a liability to eliminate, but a tool that, at the right levels, creates value.
What I Still Like
I remain proud that The Value of Debt was the first — and still I think only — book to assert that there is a Modigliani-Miller equivalent for individuals. The idea that the optimal amount of debt is not zero is both simple and powerful. The book also highlights the importance of lines of credit, common use cases, and introduces the possibility of borrowing for tax-efficient income. Cool fact: it has been translated into a few languages.
What I’d Change
Goodreads shows as many 5-star reviews as 3-star reviews, which I think is fair. The book never had a clear audience: it is neither a textbook nor a true mass-market work, and it isn’t highly specific or actionable. If I could rewrite it, I would draw sharper boundaries and offer more prescriptive guidance. Today, I see it as a worthwhile book for financial advisors, but not a must-read for society—more a thought contribution written in an anti-debt era.
Hidden Gem
Two Easter eggs still stand out. First, my choice to move beyond “purpose vs. non-purpose” loans — even though “ABLF” as a term was clunky — opened the door to a more universal debt philosophy. That transcendence ended up being fundamental to Spiral Theory. Second, Appendix D quietly offered the first framework of Balance Sheet Architecture: a comparison of no-debt vs. debt strategies. In retrospect, I wish this had been featured more prominently.
The Value of Debt in Retirement
Reviewed by the New York Times and named one of Kiplinger’s Best Books of the Year, this volume reframed debt in the context of retirement income and spending. It challenged conventional wisdom by showing how liabilities, when structured correctly, can extend financial independence.
The Value of Debt in Retirement (2015)
Author's perspective
Key Idea
This book set out to prove that debt, properly structured, can do three things everyone wants in retirement: reduce taxes, increase returns, and lower risk. It also introduced a taxonomy of debt—Oppressive (credit cards), Working (mortgages), and Enriching (voluntary, repayable)—to help individuals think more clearly about the role liabilities play after leaving the workforce.
What I Still Like
The illustrations remain powerful. A retiree with $5.4 million in net worth, $240,000 in income, and only $4,000 in taxes demonstrates how structuring debt can unlock financial freedom. While tax codes change, the principle endures: debt can be used as a lever to strengthen retirement outcomes.
What I’d Change
If I could rewrite it, I would revisit Chapter 6: Risk matters more than return. At the time I sensed the truth but lacked the math to prove it. What the chapter was hinting at—and what I later formalized in Spiral Theory—is that the quantity of money is a decisive factor in outcomes. That idea is revolutionary for retirement, because it challenges the long-standing assumption that the goal is to be debt-free.
Hidden Gem
Three tables—6.7 (p. 106), 7.1 (p. 127), and D.3 in Appendix D—have kept me up at night for a decade. The findings in those tables remain unacknowledged in wealth management, and more importantly, they are inconsistent with Modern Portfolio Theory. That contradiction is impossible—and it was my first signal that something fundamental was missing. Spiral Theory was born from the need to explain “why.”
The Value of Debt in Building Wealth (2017)
Author's perspective
Key Idea
While building wealth, you owe a debt to your future self—an unfunded obligation called retirement. The principle is simple: never carry credit card debt, keep low-cost debt such as a mortgage, and focus first on building assets before aggressively paying down liabilities. In short, reduce your debt ratio by growing assets, not by shrinking obligations.
What I Still Like
Too many people start their financial lives with too much debt, rush to pay it off, and end up under-saved for retirement. By the time they pivot, it is often too late. Flipping the order—build first, then reduce—remains mathematically sound, universally true, and still, in 2025, almost entirely absent from mainstream financial planning.
What I’d Change
This book probably should have been a whitepaper. Readers wanted a prescriptive path, and I tried to deliver one, but the framework lacked the math to make it fully defensible. The path I offered was interesting but arbitrary, clunky, and difficult to follow in practice.
Hidden Gem
The golden ratio is magical. It naturally creates a spiral, and although the path I described was forced, the seeds of Spiral Theory™ are everywhere in these pages. Another overlooked insight: You Can’t Rebalance Against Your House™. I sensed the problem but could not yet define or quantify its cost—something Spiral Theory™ later resolved.
Money Without Boundaries (2019)
Author's perspective
Key Idea
This book is hard to summarize—which is probably why few people read it. It was a thought experiment, attempting to take Friedrich Hayek’s Denationalization of Money into the next century through blockchain technology. While Hayek envisioned banks as the issuers of private money, I explored what happens when loans and risk are repriced transparently at the margin, where everyone could theoretically borrow at rates starting near zero. The central idea was that technology and transparency could strip away the exorbitant privilege that belongs today to the United States government and extend it to every person, company, and institution.
What I Still Like
The core of this vision remains compelling. Risk should be bucketed and commoditized more rationally: for example, a wealth management line of credit at 10% LTV should carry a lower rate than a billionaire’s loan at 40% LTV, or even the U.S. government’s borrowings. Today, that still isn’t the case. What I was pointing toward was the securitization of the individual. Blockchain isn’t required to make this possible, but it provides the transparency to remove intermediaries who extract enormous value. The decentralized pursuit of the true “risk-free rate” remains, to me, a cool and powerful idea.
What I’d Change
I wish I had been clearer in separating the intrinsic versus speculative value of Bitcoin and Ethereum from the noise of other crypto assets. Bitcoin and Ethereum may one day be part of the future of money, but much of what has been marketed as “crypto” is not money at all—it’s just another asset class. That distinction mattered then and matters even more now.
Hidden Gem
At its core, this book was a self-indulgent exploration of a century-old question: what is money? But this question is critical. Modern Portfolio Theory rests on the assumption of a “risk-free rate,” yet U.S. Treasuries are not risk free, gold is not risk free, and Bitcoin is not risk free. If you cannot define “risk-free,” then all asset allocation breaks down. Returning to the Credit Theory of Money, I highlighted the ancient idea—going back to Plato—that debt and money are two sides of the same coin. This insight proved foundational: it connects directly into Spiral Theory™ and the very bedrock of Balance Sheet Architecture™.
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