Unexpected mid-week power day. It’s hard to put a value on the ability to “drop everything”.
What does the title of this piece bring to mind?
Jet?
Multiple properties?
Luxury yacht charters?
Seven-figure burn rate?
Handing out favors to friends and strangers?
Being hailed and feted?
One of the best parts of my coaching journey was getting to know “the well adjusted rich.”
I’m going to spend a few Thursdays running through the lessons I learned from watching people who have a different set of limits.
The Best Teachers You Can Find
My journey started ten years before I got the job.
First, I was a student…
Meeting Joe Friel: Joe is the founder of triathlon coaching in the United States. I had the chance to spend a weekend with him in the Spring of 2000.
By the way, this is how you might get a mentor interested in you…
I went to him
I showed him how he’d helped me
I listened to his advice
I went away and did it
Something he said stuck with me, “I’d never met someone who understood my teaching as well as you.” I didn’t just study his philosophy, I tried to embody it.
Joe started me as a coach, helped me win races and wrote a book with me.
Great deal for both of us.
The strategy worked once, so I repeated…
John Hellemans, Scott Molina, Dave Scott, Mark Allen => I was able to learn from the best.
I shared what I learned, for free, widely.
Eventually, I was a teacher…
A decade later, I turn up in Oceanside, on a road bike, in March, and crush most everyone over 40 in a 70.3 race.
Two guys, I’d never heard of, reach out for a call and I accept. I didn’t know they were friends and checking me out, separately.
I get hired and have the chance to look under the hood of the well-adjusted rich.
Turns out my client was a successful finance-guy, who stayed in the game.
His life was, and remains, the best-case scenario of a life I decided not to lead.
Teach your kids their financial lives will be about no more than a dozen choices.
Here are mine:
Study finance (class of 1990)
Save 50% of my take home (1990-2007)
Partners investment scheme (late 90s, all in then, equivalent of 1 yr spending now)
Work to build a startup (2000)
Sell into the frenzy (2005-2007)
Move into a low-cost Vanguard portfolio (2008 onwards)
Boulder real estate (2010 & 2012))
Downsize (2012-2013)
Borrow long at 3.25% (2013)
Debt free (2007 & 2020)
Have kids with a kind woman from a humble background (on going)
Every other choice turned out to be noise. What to do?
Focus on actions, not outcome.
What does that really mean?
Do what moves you forward and have faith. Sport, marriage, money, all things… daily action is the fundamental force moving you towards “better.”
Education matters => I was given a chance in Private Equity because I had high marks in a useful field. Between my high school graduation (1986) and my youngest’s (2031) the nature of “useful” will have changed. However, the need for skilled people to “do” will endure.
The most useful part of my degree wasn’t finance! It was financial accounting, programming and mathematics => I learned fundamental knowledge in college. I learned my profession on-the-job. You learn the valuable part by doing work, for the best people you can find.
This keeps popping up over and over again (professors, partners, coaches, mentors, twitter follows). At 53, I’m learning from people less than half my age! Do work to learn.
Avoid Ruin => studying, then working in, financial accounting helps you learn when a situation doesn’t feel right. Embezzlement is an old game and it’s useful to learn the patterns. Financial fraud happens, and will continue to happen. Take steps to reduce your family’s exposure to ruin.
With the accounting, I learned the most with 9 credits spread across three courses. Financial Accounting 1, 2 and 3. Small investment, huge return. Do it when you’re young. Being forced to rely on others to do your financial math is a disadvantage that will cost you.
Let’s pull it together for you…
Starting your working life (in a useful field, with your financial accounting courses done)…
Waiting for the fat pitch – once in a lifetime investment opportunities happen once a decade
Turning yourself into the sort of person you’d like to marry, the friend you’d like to have, the parent you aspire to be => meaningful connection is true wealth
Your mind will try to trick you into thinking it’s the investment choices that matter.
It is not.
It is the four habits I outlined above, and avoiding substance abuse.
I’ve been watching two of my teachers duke it out in public and it reminded me of something I want to teach my kids.
Fun weekend with the Fam
What do you want?
We are most easily deceived by our desires.
So start by asking, “what did I want?”
Then dig deeper.
My desires leave me open to deception.
Absent wanting, I can’t be fooled.
This knowledge is helpful to prevent the next person from using our desires against us AND so we can use self-awareness to guide effective action.
I was thinking back on races where I’d been impacted by cheating, and I remembered the fastest Half Marathon I ever ran was chasing down a guy who cut the bike course. I was so upset! That gave me a big smile, in a way, he did me a favor.
Other races, other outcomes.
When I looked deeper, I didn’t always like what I found.
Ego.
An insatiable desire to “prove” myself better than others.
Not being able to feed that desire with external victories nudged me to look for other ways to prove merit. Again, my competition may have done me a favor.
Teachers & Mentors
I have learned from teachers with different goals, lifestyles and values from me. Sometimes, our teachers become a source of energy to do better within our own lives, and with our closest relationships.
Related, the first time you really get to know one of your heroes… it can be disappointing. We’re all flawed in some way. My kids are starting to learn my flaws, and they forgive me.
After the disappointment can come liberation. Take the best ideas and execute. There never was any magic.
Still, when you notice a difference in values, be wary. It’s not about right/wrong, more about compatibility. More in Drucker’s famous article about Managing Oneself.
When seeking a mentor, your wants might fool you into seeking to emulate a person who doesn’t fit your values.
Looking deeply, again.
My values & wants… from the inside, it feels like I’m in total control. I’m not.
By crafting my closest relationships, my mentors, my attention… I guide my life.
In some cases, I am better learning from a distance.
Which brings us to the final point.
Don’t torch the joint on the way out!
History tells me that I am going feel different about things later.
Life is about living, not building a habit of argument.
My kids won’t fully appreciate my choices until after I’m gone.
My #1 financial goal for my kids is debt-free education in a field that enables them to get paid.
With the very best of intentions, the US Government has completely screwed up both (a) the cost of college education and (b) the financial lives of the students they were seeking to help.
Debt isn’t free.
Every market juiced with easy money gets screwed up.
Explanation below – my life mirrors the blue line – graduate early, debt free, start saving
I googled up average debt at graduation and average graduation age.
$40,000 and 23 yo.
So let’s make three simple scenarios:
Debt free early graduation (21 yo) => McGill 1990 finance grad
Debt free at 25 yo
Debt free at 30 yo
Let’s run it forward assuming:
Investment return of 5%, prior year close
$20,000 per annum savings
The late-start saver
who saves at the same annual rate
who earns the same return
ends up ~$1 million behind at 60 yo.
This is not the whole story, not even close!
In my demographic, families can burn ~$250,000 of capital to help a kid “get started” => 529 accounts and parental support. Even more if you roll private from Kindergarten.
What’s the 30-year cost of this choice?
$250,000 * (1.05)^30 = $1,080,000
Million bucks gone, you never see it.
You burned the capital
The kid figures life out by 30, and spends most of their 20s pissed at you (for tapering their support) 😉
$2 million opportunity cost, spread between two generations.
You assume it was what you were supposed to do and are grateful you finally got them off the payroll.
A possible alternative…
Our default position is in-state education and I’ll buy whatever’s left of your 529, at $2 on the dollar, once you save $100,000 of your own money.
Feel The Byrn 
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