When people ask why I became a financial planner and started Austin Creek Capital, I think about the part-time job I had when I was a student at UC-Berkeley in the late 1990s. I worked for a website publisher who landed a contract to build a personal finance website for Microsoft. My job? To build a database of personal finance questions and answers.Like most 20-year-olds, I knew very little about personal finance, so I went to a local bookstore, found the business section, and bought a big stack of books about investing, saving, tax optimization, and home buying. I read them all and was intrigued. Yes, I could use this knowledge to build the Q&A database for Microsoft, but more importantly, I realized, this kind of knowledge could help people build better lives. Life went on. I fin...