Assume at your own risk
Misplaced expectations and assumptions create misery.
I am sure you remember as a kid when you asked for something at Christmas only to get something else.
You look across the room to your parents with sorrow in your soul.
You say, “That’s not what I wanted.”
They look back at you, sad and confused, and shrug their shoulders.
Everyone feels bad about something that was supposed to be good.
Or as an adult, when you thought you’d land that client, get that house, or be the one to get promoted, only for it to pass through your fingertips.
You assumed wrongly and felt pain.
Life is hard; it’s all the harder when you assume wrongly.
Further, when you assume something about what someone else has, you implicitly believe you don’t have enough or are not enough.
Assumptions can destroy the most important thing you have: time.
This week, I will share how I learned this and give you a tool to block out the noise and build a better financial life.
I tried, failed, and learned this about wealth
And I am going to let you in on a secret about money that only accountants, financial advisors, and estate attorneys know:
People are horrible at guessing how much money someone has.
You could assume someone driving a 2023 Porsche was “rich” and the person driving the 2014 Toyota was “not.”
Sometimes, the Porche driver has a $10m, or they have a $100k car loan for it.
Sometimes, the Toyota driver has a negative net worth, or they have $500k in cash.
You’ll never know what they have or don’t have, and your guess is probably wildly off.
Here’s why I never guess about how much money someone has.
First, it doesn’t matter.
Second, you’ll never know how much someone has or does not have.
Over the past decade, I’ve met with hundreds of families, discussing every nook and cranny of their financial lives.
What I can tell you, and what I tell people, is that people have way more or way less money than you think.
I learned this the hard way.
During my college years, I owned a window cleaning company.
I started it because I wanted to get married to my high school sweetheart and needed money.
My client acquisition plan was this: go to “nice” neighborhoods and ask people to their faces if they wanted their windows clean.
Super easy business – $5 for a perfectly cleaned window, inside and out.
One summer evening, I drove my 2000 Navy Blue Buick Century with three ladders on top to one of the nicest neighborhoods in my city.
I drove in, parked, and hit the pavement – beautiful new homes with 50+ windows everywhere surrounded me.
Everywhere this poor college student looked was a $250+ job.
I needed three or four jobs to keep me busy for the rest of the week.
I started knocking on doors.
And got no business.
The neighborhood I thought was a “rich” neighborhood that could afford a luxury service such as window cleaning turned out to be a high-earning neighborhood of 30/40-year-olds who were house-rich and cash-poor.
I mistook the nice home for cash in the bank.
I wasted their time and mine.
I failed.
But by getting rejected in this neighborhood, I learned one of the most important lessons about money.
Wealth is just a number.
It doesn’t look like anything.
The wise Morgan Housel defines wealth as what’s left over after you spend everything.
Notice that there is not anything in that definition that says, “and lives in a…” “drives a…” or “owns a business that does….”
It’s a number, not a display of something.
It’s the output of every financial decision you’ve ever made.
And you get more of it by using time.
But how do you make great decisions when the world seems to be reminding you at every step that you need that new car or bigger home now, or you need to own a business to be somebody now?
How do you quit the now treadmill and start creating a better financial lie?
The Line of Sanity
Here’s my secret weapon for staying focused on the right things as I build Fjell, invest in the equity markets, and help clients create outstanding financial lives.
I call it the Line of Sanity.
Here is how the line works.
The X-axis is your age, and the Y-axis is money.
The older you get, the less time you have to build wealth; the younger you are, the less money you have, but the more time.
The dotted part of the line represents where you want to go financially, while the solid part of the line represents where you have been.
The line is created through your financial plan.
You want to stay on this line.
Your line is how you stay out of trouble in life and brush off setbacks.
Over 14,000 of you got this email today, and your line is 100% unique to you.
Here’s how I use mine.
I devised this concept to solve a particular problem: while I run a successful wealth management company at age 34, my peers are often 20-30 years older than me, with ten times bigger businesses.
They can do things we cannot because they have more profits, assets under management, staff, etc.
I can’t snap my fingers and have a ten times bigger business with ten times more clients and staff.
But I have something they don’t have – time.
As long as I do the right activities over time, I will get to where they are.
Time is my friend, not my foe.
Rather than wishing something was different, I remember my line and the activities I need to do to say on my line:
- Leading our team.
- Building great portfolios.
- Serving clients.
- And earning enough trust and confidence for a sliver of you to build and manage your wealth at Fjell.
I stay laser-focused on my line.
When I feel I am “not good enough” or see someone farther along in business than I am.
I look at my line and stay the course.
The line is about commitment to your future self, your family, and yourself in the present.
And the line is what I remind myself all the time.
Bonus Secret
I want to share one more universal fact about money.
And if you start using your line, you’ll quickly learn this.
Almost 100% of the time, when you learn that someone has “made it” financially, they are almost always older than you or inherited money from someone, well old.
Most people earn the same-ish returns over time to grow their assets.
The main difference is that they usually have had more time in the game than you.
That’s it—older people have way more money than younger people, not because they are different but because they’ve been investing longer.
If you see a 40-year-old business owner crushing it in life, they probably started their business 18 years ago.
Wealth is often created using large amounts of time.
I wrote this edition to help you square up time, money, and assumptions.
And dispel rampant myths on social media, such as the one that “everyone is rich, and I’m not.”
These assumptions can kill the very courage you need to invest vs spend.
And squander your precious time.
I’ve managed over $100m for almost my entire career and attended many meetings in Wall Street’s ivory towers.
Here’s what I know to be true.
There are no silver bullets to growing wealth; it requires discipline, hard work, and using time to one’s advantage.
You have a line.
Find it.
And stay on it, for a long time.
