We have been on this corner for sixty years.

1966

An audacious dream

Bob Bingham was thirty-four. Norman Hensley was thirty. In the middle of Holy Week they bought out the insurance side of the agency where they both worked and went out on their own. It was April 1. Nobody starts a firm on April Fools’ Day on purpose.

The Dow stood at 830 and a bear market was already underway. They began anyway, on an audacious dream, a great deal of courage, a healthy dose of naive optimism, and the total commitment of a family. Jeff was six.

Bob ran it with a yellow legal pad, a pen, and an HP 12c calculator, and came to computers late and reluctantly. None of that mattered, because what he actually had was the trust of the people across the table from him, and no tool has ever been invented that supplies that. We have Orion and Schwab and an options overlay now. Not one of them replaces what he had.

Neither has the rule underneath the whole firm changed. The first rule is never lose your money. The second is never forget the first. Conservative, here, is not caution for its own sake. It is the conviction that the money took you a lifetime to build and should not take one bad decision to lose.

1975

The first test

Nine years in, Bob suffered a massive heart attack and spent more than a month in intensive care. Jeff was fifteen.

The firm survived on Norman, on the staff, and on the family closing ranks around it. A firm with no character does not survive losing one of its two founders for a month. This one did.

1986

The ground shifts

Both founders had earned their CFP designations and broadened the practice well beyond life insurance. For twenty years the firm had sold a great deal of real estate through limited partnerships, along with a sprinkling of mutual funds. Under the tax rates of the day they were genuinely useful, both as investments and as tax planning.

Then Wall Street overbuilt them for the tax benefit. A great many of those deals had no real estate underneath worth owning. The Tax Reform Act of 1986 removed the deductions in a single stroke, and the value went with them.

An investment has to stand on its own merits. If the reason to own it is the tax treatment, you do not own an investment. You own a tax code, and tax codes change.

That lesson was expensive and it is still in force here.

1989

The homecoming

Jeff came home with, in his words, hard knocks and lumps: mornings at the firm learning the business, nights in a restaurant earning a living, because Bob could not afford to pay him.

When Bob’s heart faltered again in September 1989, Jeff walked into Norman’s office and asked what he needed to do. He trained under Norman from there and was full-time by 1990. The second generation had begun.

1991

The first turn

Two years in, Jeff wrote his father a long memo arguing that the firm should become an investment firm, built on mutual funds and variable annuities rather than what it had been doing. He was twenty-six and he was not yet an equal.

His father read it and said yes.

It was the first of three times this firm has changed direction because the youngest person in it argued that it should.

The 1990s

The Eastman wave

Eastman spun off from Kodak in the early 1990s, and its point-based pension system began sending people into retirement at fifty, fifty-five, fifty-six with lump sums in hand. Money was, as Jeff put it, running out the doors. The 1990s became the firm’s largest growth decade.

The firm was pointed in the right direction when it happened. We would like to claim we saw it coming. We did not. We were ready, which is a different thing.

But the real work was a question. Bob and Norman would look at a fifty-three-year-old across the desk and ask: what are you going to do for the rest of your life? It puzzled the retirees. It also planted the philosophy that would eventually be named the Four Seasons, the idea that money is in service of a life and not the other way around.

If you spent a career at Eastman, or next door to someone who did, this is not a story we are telling you. It is one you already know.

1999

The second turn

The second memo argued that the firm should stop being paid by commission on mutual fund sales and move to fee-based advisory.

The writing was the easy part. The hard part was the unwinding, position by position, across share classes that all behaved differently, for every client the firm had. There was no template for it, so we wrote one.

We did it years before the industry was pushed in that direction. When we tell you our interests sit on your side of the table, that is not a compliance sentence. It is a decision that cost us real money in the year we made it.

2000–2002

The first crucible

The tech crash hit exactly the people most exposed to it: young retirees drawing down lump sums on fixed schedules. Some in town went broke and went back to work.

Ours held. Not because we saw the crash coming, but because the portfolios had been built for storms, to lose less on the way down. So a bad year never became a bad decade at anybody’s house. We took those calls one kitchen table at a time.

It was the first act of a lost decade; 2008 would bring the second, and the same discipline carried people through both. The philosophy this firm still runs on was not written in a calm room. It was forged in fire.

2005

The firm holds

Julianna was born, and in the same year Jennifer was diagnosed with stage-four cancer. The family’s world narrowed to the halls of Duke, from summer into October.

Jeff ran the practice remotely. Norman came back to work, and Bob worked too, so that, in Jeff’s words, his children could have a mother and not just a father. The firm held, because it was never only one person.

2010 & 2012

Losing the builders

Bob died in August 2010. Nearly every day to the end he told his son the same thing: I’m going to get better, and I’m going to come down there and help you. He left this world better than he found it, and that is still the standard this firm measures itself against.

Two years later, in December 2012, Norman died. He had given the firm forty-six years.

2014–2015

A new name, a new home

Bingham & Hensley became B&H Wealth Strategies in 2014. The next fall, on October 1, 2015, Jeff joined Silver Oak Securities after years of feeling like just a number at a larger firm. He has called it the best thing that ever happened in his practice.

October 1 was Bob’s birthday. Jeff has learned to pay attention to dates like that.

2021

The third turn

Jake is the reason we own Bitcoin, and that story is worth telling properly.

In late 2017, Jeff wrote a piece in My Views comparing Bitcoin to the Dutch tulip mania of the 1630s. Given what the asset was at the time, that was a reasonable conclusion and it was the serious view. When the facts changed, so did the firm, on the principle that when the facts change, that’s what you write about. If we are going to ask you to trust our judgment, you are entitled to know where it has been and how long it took us to move.

Jake had already reached a different conclusion, and he argued it for years while outranked. Between 2017 and 2021, three things matured. The asset itself, the younger man making the case, and the older one hearing it. By 2020 the argument had been joined by investors whose judgment Jeff respects, and the research on how a small allocation actually behaved in a portfolio did the rest.

The firm allocated on July 1, 2021, and has held it since.

A firm can be old, or it can be early. We have managed to be both.

Sixty years on the same corner is the first half of that sentence. An allocation held since 2021 is the second. Between the two of them sits the actual point, which is that the old and the new are both in the room here, and they argue, and sometimes the new one wins.

It took Jeff three years to arrive where his son already was. The next turn is already somebody’s job here, and he has been right before.

2022

The season that tested it

Jake joined the firm full time in the hardest season the family has ever known. His own decision, made in the middle of the storm and not in spite of it. The third generation began there.

2023

The turn

The firm that came through those years is the one you meet today. Same principles, deeper roots.

2026

Sixty years

The sixtieth anniversary celebration falls on September 24, 2026, which is also the birthday of Jeff’s brother John. That is not lost on anyone in the family.

Sixty years began with an audacious dream and the total commitment of a family, and the same things carry it forward.