24 Jan 2025 Meaningful Efficiency
Several years ago, I wrote about how we canceled our Amazon Prime membership. The decision was less about whether the cost of Prime fit into our family’s budget and was more about whether we were paying for a service that didn’t actually benefit us. It’s been three years, and we still haven’t resubscribed! Much to some people’s surprise, you can still order from Amazon without Prime. Sure, there are some tv shows we’ve not had the opportunity to watch, but I don’t anticipate that we will resubscribe anytime soon. Don’t hear what I’m not saying, though. No shame for those who use Prime. I’m all for using services that offer meaningful differences in our lives. This one just doesn’t for us right now.
Our time and attention gets pulled in a million different directions these days. We’re expected to keep up with a never-ending inflow of information while simultaneously continuing to operate at top levels in our careers, relationships, and hobbies. It’s no wonder that there’s an abundance of services or subscriptions that all promise to deliver savings of our time and money, freeing us up to do other things. All these services (like Prime) attempt to alleviate some burden. There are even subscriptions that help you keep track of all your other subscriptions! Sometimes I wonder if we are just trying to be efficient for efficiency’s sake.
Yes, efficiency in our day to day lives is important. Maximize productivity, minimize waste. However, we must also ask the follow-up question: Now what? What will come of having more free time, since Prime is removing my need to drive all around the city getting various goods? With the gift of time, or money saved, how can I use my talents and resources elsewhere for things that matter to me?
Efficiency matters in our investment strategy, too. How do you maximize return for any specific level of risk? It can be tempting to try to get too fancy in our investments, as seen with the rise of actively managed funds and other types of investments. Beacon’s investment philosophy falls on the passive end of the active vs. passive spectrum, but it’s not really passive at all. Instead, our portfolios are efficiently invested in the market, which allows more of our time to be spent paying attention to all areas of our financial lives.
A clear, efficient, diversified investment portfolio means your hard-earned resources are doing as much work for you as they can, for your given level of risk. Building out a financial plan allows you to contemplate scenarios that may not have seemed possible before. You are freed up to focus attention on ways to make a meaningful difference in your corner of the world. For example, for someone approaching retirement, simply knowing that retiring tomorrow could be an option (maybe with tradeoffs to make that feasible) may make all the difference in enjoying work and finding meaning again. I can’t speak for everyone at Beacon, but the privilege of walking alongside clients as you consider paths forward is one of the best parts of our job.
