<![CDATA[The New Diligence

<![CDATA[The New Diligence - Blog]]>Thu, 21 May 2026 04:00:07 -0700Weebly<![CDATA[Buying Back Time: The High-ROI Purchase We Don’t Usually Make]]>Tue, 19 May 2026 07:00:00 GMThttps://www.thenewdiligence.com/blog/buying-back-time-the-high-roi-purchase-we-dont-usually-makeHappy Money Series | How to Spend Well and Enjoy Your Money More

Every Saturday afternoon through my high school years, I mowed the lawn at my childhood home. Week after week, I'd push that mower around in the SoCal heat, across the multiple grass areas in the front and back yard. All in all, the job took a grueling hour and a half.

Now I live in a house with a much smaller, but still reasonably sized, patch of grass. Ask me if I mow it myself. Heck no.

The way I see it, I pay for lawn care one way or another. I either a) pay money for someone else to do it, or b) pay with my time and suffer through the dread of a chore I can't stand.

For most people, option b) is the default. We grind through the chores we can't stand because outsourcing them feels lazy, or because we figure the money is better spent on almost anything else. It rarely registers as a financial decision at all. As it turns out, behavioral finance research says otherwise.

Time Is the One Asset You Can't Get More Of

I'm now the father of a three-month-old girl, so it’s no shocker that my free time is rather limited these days -- and that's with one kid. People with two or three are operating on a different plane of scarcity entirely.

It’s not just a parenting thing, either. Time collapses for all kinds of reasons: a brutal stretch at work, a parent who gets sick and suddenly needs you, a move, a health scare, a relationship that needs to be more nurtured. Life routinely reaches in and quietly garnishes your hours, and unlike money, there's no version of time you can save up or recover later.

Yet we keep telling ourselves we'll have more time later than we do now. So we white-knuckle through the present and promise ourselves relief down the road. The future arrives, the time still isn't there, and we make the same trade over again.

Researcher Ashley Whillans, who has spent her career studying this exact trade-off, has a name for what this adds up to at a population level: time famine. When her team analyzed a Gallup survey of 2.5 million Americans, 80% said they didn't have the time to do everything they wanted in a day.¹ People who feel time-poor are less happy, more anxious, and more stressed. In her data, time stress dragged on happiness more than unemployment did.

Now I have my doubts over the validity of a packed calendar representing more of a weight on someone’s life than being jobless; however, I am certainly on board with the notion that humans don’t fully comprehend the magnitude of unhappiness that can come from lack of time.

More Money Often Means Even Less Time

You'd expect wealthier people to feel the most time rich. Afterall, they can hire the cleaner, take the cab, or pay for the shortcut. But research suggest the opposite: across studies in Europe, Asia, and North America, people who earn more report feeling more pressed for time, not less.²

When a resource is valuable, we perceive it as scarce. The more you're paid, the more value you attach to your time. Thus, those who make more can feel the loss of time more acutely.

Removing The Negative

There's a popular rule in happiness literature: spend on experiences, not things. I even wrote about it just last week! However, there’s another missing piece to this equation: we can spend money to outsource jobs we don't like or simplify our lives.

Previously mentioned researcher Ashley Whillans and her frequent collaborator Elizabeth Dunn studied what happens when people spend money specifically to offload tasks they hate (cleaning, yard work, errands, sitting in traffic). The conclusion was that not enough attention goes to buying your way out of unpleasant tasks.

Think of it this way: nearly all discretionary budgeting is built around adding a positive: the vacation, the nice dinner, the concert. Very little is built around removing a negative. But the utility of each is asymmetrically weighted. Eliminating a recurring source of dread often does more for your weekly baseline than stacking one nicer thing on top of a week that still contains the dreaded thing. It’s hard to enjoy an experience as much if you know the house needs deep cleaning.

The Millionaire Who Still Mows His Own Lawn

Whillans and her colleagues surveyed 818 millionaires. Nearly half said they spent nothing outsourcing tasks they disliked.³ In separate studies, 99% of people could instantly name a chore they'd love to pay someone else to do, yet only 17% actually spent money to make that happen.
What does this mean? It means that the barrier isn't really money at all. As Whillans found, paying someone to do tasks we don't like can make us feel lazy or wasteful, so we opt out just to avoid that feeling.

In other words, it’s more of a permission problem than a capital problem.

So consider this your permission slip. As a personal finance specialist, I'm telling you it is a sound, defensible use of money to pay someone to take a chore you hate off your plate. Not a guilty splurge, not a luxury you have to justify, but a reasonable line item.

To be clear, this isn't a mandate to outsource every laborious task. If you genuinely don't mind mowing your own lawn, keep mowing it and bank the money. My point isn't that chores are beneath anyone, but rather that the dread you feel toward a specific task has a real cost, and you're allowed to spend money to make it go away.

Spending the Time Well Once You've Got It

One more note about buying time: it only pays off if you don't immediately squander what you bought back.

In a study comparing millionaires to people of average net worth, the wealthier group was happier in part because they spent roughly 30 more minutes a day on active leisure and 40 fewer minutes on passive leisure.⁴ Reclaiming two hours from a chore and pouring all of it back into scrolling Instagram doesn't move the needle. Spend it on people, movement, or something you actually find absorbing, and it does.

The Reframe: Keeping Tabs On Your Happiness Dollars

Want to put this into practice? Here's a simple way to start.

For one month, sort your discretionary spending into two buckets: money spent buying into a good mood (the retail therapy, the dinner, the ball game) versus money spent buying out of a bad one (the house cleaner, the grocery delivery, the express lane on your commute). Whillans' work suggests spending as little as $40 to save time can buy more happiness than spending that same $40 on stuff.⁵

You don't need to outsource everything. Just find the one or two recurring tasks that hang over your whole week and pay for somebody else to take care of it. You'll be surprised how much lighter the week feels once the dreaded thing is simply gone.

Frame it that way and hiring that house cleaner might not seem like such a splurge. Instead, it starts looking like an undervalued asset, especially in a season of life when the hours simply aren't there to be had at any price.

Back to Blog

References
¹ Whillans, A. (2019, January 24). Time for happiness. Harvard Business Review.
² Ibid
³ Whillans, A. (2019, January 24). Time for happiness. Harvard Business Review. See also Whillans, A.V., Dunn, E.W., Smeets, P., Bekkers, R., & Norton, M.I. (2017). Buying time promotes happiness. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 114(32), 8523–8527.
⁴ Whillans, A. (2019, January 24). Time for happiness. Harvard Business Review.
⁵ Ibid

]]><![CDATA[Why Travel and Experiences are a Triple-Threat Investment]]>Tue, 12 May 2026 07:00:00 GMThttps://www.thenewdiligence.com/blog/why-travel-and-experiences-are-a-triple-threat-investmentHappy Money Series | How to Spend Well and Enjoy Your Money More

In the winter of 2025, after five years of 'we should really do this,' my friends and I boarded a flight to Hokkaido, Japan. We were going to experience "Japow", the legendary powder snow that has made Hokkaido one of the most coveted ski destinations on the planet.

If you're not familiar, many ski resorts in Hokkaido (the north island in Japan) receive well over 500 inches of snowfall in any given winter. It's one of the snowiest places in the world, and we had been waiting years to finally ski it firsthand.

The planning phase of this trip alone was a rewarding process; locking down the tour company, mapping out resorts, researching restaurants, building a loose itinerary for Tokyo and Kyoto. Months of excitement and anticipation materialized on a shared google doc, building toward our January departure date.

Then, in the week before we left, a dry spell appeared in the forecast. We weren't too worried… a few days without fresh snow wouldn’t completely ruin the trip.

But it was not a just few days…

This dry stretch lasted our entire 10-day ski touring trip; not a single inch of fresh snow fell while we were in Hokkaido — one of the snowiest places in the world — during a winter where most of the resorts we visited recorded 400-600” snowfall totals. Not an inch.

I’d being lying if I said this didn’t crush our collective spirits. Yes, we were in Japan, one of the most incredible countries I've ever visited. Yes, we were all skiing blue-bird days together, eating amazing food, and exploring somewhere none of us had ever been. Yes, we still laughed the entire trip. We also spent several days in Tokyo and Kyoto before flying home, and those days were nothing short of spectacular.

But if you had asked me to rate my ‘Japow’ experience in real time? I would have given it a 7 out of 10. I came in expecting knee-deep powder, and the reality didn't match. When you build something up for so long, the gap between expectation and experience can be a gut punch.

Looking back on that trip today, though, I wouldn’t trade it for anything. I'd go back tomorrow if I could.

I was with some of my closest friends, who, on any given day are scattered across the country and are seldom all in the same city at the same time. We spent two weeks together exploring a country we had never seen. We skied nine days in a row, ate incredibly well, and laughed constantly, even at our own terrible snow fortune.

In hindsight? That trip is a 10/10. Easily.

That gap between a 7 in the moment and a 10 in the rearview is exactly what this article is about.

Memories don't just sit in some drawer in the back of our brains. Memories appreciate. When you understand the psychology behind why that happens, experiences (like my trip to Japan) stop feeling like a splurge and start looking like one of the best investments you can make with your money.

Memories Don't Depreciate, They Appreciate

There is a reason you remember your best trips more fondly than you experienced them in real time. It isn't selective memory or wishful thinking.

Through a process researchers call the Fading Affect Bias, the emotional weight of negative experiences fades significantly faster than the emotional weight of positive ones. The long airport lines, the bad weather, the flight delay; all details that lose their sting over time. The peaks survive.¹

A 2023 study out of Cornell illustrated this as cleanly as any: participants consistently rated past experiences more positively months later than they did in real time, and their satisfaction continued to climb the more they retold the stories.²

This is the opposite of what happens with material goods.

Buy a new car, and the thrill peaks somewhere around the first week. From there, hedonic adaptation kicks in and the brain recategorizes it from "exciting new thing" to "background of normal life." Your brain just stops registering the new car almost right away.³

Experiences work differently because memories are not static recordings. Every time you recall a trip, your brain reconstructs it. In the process of that reconstruction, the hippocampus and amygdala work together to give a higher emotional weighting to the positive moments. The result is a memory that improves with age.

The Three Phases of Experience Value

Material purchases have one moment of peak value: the day you buy them. Experiences are different; they pay you back in three separate ways.

Phase 1: Anticipatory Utility
The return on a great trip starts long before you board the plane. Behavioral economists call this anticipatory utility, and research suggests it can be the highest-joy phase of the entire experience.

A Cornell study found that people derive more positive emotion from anticipating an upcoming experience than from anticipating an upcoming purchase. The planning itself becomes part of the product.⁴ For our Japan trip, that meant five years of conversation, a shared Google doc, resort and hotel research, and restaurant lists. The trip hadn't even happened yet, and it was already delivering.

Phase 2: Experiential Utility
This is the phase we tend to over-weigh when deciding whether a trip was "worth it." It is also the most volatile. Weather, logistics, illness, and unmet expectations can all drag the real-time rating down. As my Japan trip demonstrated, a 7 in the moment is not the final score.
The experience is significant, but it is just one chapter of a three-chapter story.

Phase 3: Memory Utility
This is where the real return lives. Every time you recall the trip, share a story from it, or laugh about what went wrong, you are collecting a memory dividend. Unlike a stock that pays out once a quarter, this dividend has no dividend schedule and no expiration date. The more you retell it, the more embedded it becomes in your identity.

Economists and psychologists describe this as residual utility, and here’s what makes it genuinely remarkable from a financial perspective: the ROI on a memory technically increases every year you hold it, at zero additional cost.⁵

A $2,000 trip we revisit mentally and socially for the next 20 years is a completely different purchase than a $2,000 Peloton bike collecting dust in the garage. The price tag may be the same, but the return we receive is not even close.

The Social Dividend

There is one more dimension to the return on experiences that anyone who has sat around a dinner table with good friends understands:

Experiences are socially rich in a way that material goods simply are not.

Talking about a material purchase tends to trigger social comparison, while talking about an experience tends to trigger social connection. When you mention a new house or new car, people start benchmarking. When you tell the story about a trip you took, people tend to lean in and contribute to the conversation.⁶

My Japan story is a perfect example. Every time we tell someone about that trip, they ask about the food I ate, cities I visited, and places I saw. This is the social fungibility of experiences. They open conversations, build connections, and become part of a shared narrative between the people who’ve experienced something similar. Material goods typically fail to accomplish this same social value.

The Investment Reframe

The three-phase framework also undersells one of the best parts about investing in experiences: even the disasters can pay off.

Take a Europe trip I went on in 2017. My wallet got stolen in the airport right before I got on the plane to leave, which left me cash-strapped and credit card-less on a foreign continent (this was the pre-apple pay era). I had to get really creative just to move between cities, constantly asking strangers for help, and at one point, missing a flight from London to Germany because a train kiosk wouldn’t accept anything other than credit cards.

In finance terms, this was a total portfolio collapse. It was stressful and downright frustrating at times. But in the rearview mirror, that disaster is now one of my highest-growth assets. My pain made for a hilarious post-mortem breakdown of my travels. I get to share the story of my wallet-less, struggle-filled, solo Europe experience again and again.

When we spend on experiences, we are essentially diversifying our lives. We are moving numbers from our bank account into a permanent, inflation-proof residency in our own identity. Most material goods we buy end up in a landfill, but even an experience that registers as a "market meltdown" becomes a good story to tell forever.

So, stop looking at experiences as a "line-item expense." It’s a capital allocation toward the only version of wealth that actually appreciates as you age.

Conclusion

Travel, concerts, sporting events, festivals, beach days, holiday events, family dinners… these aren't frivolous line items to be justified after the "real" financial decisions are made. They ARE the real financial decisions, at least when it comes to where discretionary dollars generate the most lasting return.

The three-phase return on our experiences (anticipation, the event itself, and years of memory dividends) makes a genuinely compelling case for how we should spend our discretionary money.

Your financial plan should reflect that. Not in a reckless manner or at the expense of the fundamentals (emergency expenses, retirement saving, etc). However, if the choice is between another material purchase that flatlines in value and an experience that compounds in your memory for the next twenty years, the math skews toward the latter.

And for those approaching retirement: the window for some of these experiences is finite in a way that a bank account balance is not. Spend accordingly.

More Reading:
Want to Enjoy Your Coffee More? Don’t Buy It Every Day
Why Americans Are Still Grieving Over High Prices
Retirement Calculators Give You One Number. Reality Gives You a Range.

Return to Blog

References
¹ Walker, W.R., Skowronski, J.J., & Thompson, C.P. (2003). Life is pleasant and memory helps to keep it that way. Review of General Psychology, 7, 203–210.
² Kumar, A., Killingsworth, M.A., & Gilovich, T. (2014). Waiting for Merlot: Anticipatory consumption of experiential and material purchases. Psychological Science, 25(10), 1924–1931.
³ Frederick, S., & Loewenstein, G. (1999). Hedonic Adaptation. In D. Kahneman, E. Diener, & N. Schwarz (Eds.), Well-Being: The Foundations of Hedonic Psychology. Russell Sage Foundation.
⁴ Kumar, A., Killingsworth, M.A., & Gilovich, T. (2014). Waiting for Merlot: Anticipatory consumption of experiential and material purchases. Psychological Science, 25(10), 1924–1931.
⁵ Van Boven, L., & Gilovich, T. (2003). To do or to have? That is the question. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85(6), 1193–1202.
⁶ Gilovich, T., Kumar, A., & Jampol, L. (2015). A wonderful life: Experiential consumption and the pursuit of happiness. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 25(1), 152–165.

]]><![CDATA[Want to Enjoy Your Coffee More? Don’t Buy It Every Day]]>Tue, 05 May 2026 07:00:00 GMThttps://www.thenewdiligence.com/blog/want-to-enjoy-your-coffee-more-dont-buy-it-every-dayHappy Money Series | How to Spend Well and Enjoy Your Money More

There's a personal finance cliché that has been running for decades: stop buying lattes, invest the money instead, and you'll retire with an extra $170,000. David Bach, a renowned financial author who coined "The Latte Factor," was not wrong in pointing out the massive effect of compound interest over a long period.

Skipping the morning coffee run can indeed save us thousands over the long run, but the argument fails to address an even larger problem. Buying a latte every single day costs more than a few dollars — it costs us the enjoyment of the treat itself! When that $6 coffee becomes an everyday habit, we slowly kill the dopamine boost that made it worth buying in the first place.

Your Brain Is Tuning You Out

Our brains tend to return to a stable emotional baseline regardless of what's happening in your life. This is known as hedonic adaptation.¹

Research suggests that within a year of winning the lottery (yes, literally winning the jackpot) people's reported happiness typically reverts to where it started.

Coffee runs can be categorized by this same mechanism. I’ll elaborate:

My favorite coffee shop is San Francisco-originated Philz Coffee. As the father of a 3-month-old, in the mornings I crave a Mission Cold Brew from Philz more than sleep itself. But even in the sleep-deprived trenches, I’ve realized that if I let my favorite drink become a daily reflex, it loses its power to rescue my morning.

Our brains are mighty efficient at adapting. Once something occurs on a daily basis, our minds stop registering it as a meaningful event. That cold brew, ordered every morning without thinking, stops being a treat the moment it becomes a default.

Many Small Pleasures Trump A Few Big Ones

One of the most striking insights from the research paper 'If money doesn't make you happy, then you probably aren't spending it right' is the hidden power of adaptation: our brains possess a relentless ability to get used to whatever surrounds us, no matter how exciting the shift feels at the beginning.²

A new iPhone feels miraculous for all of two weeks, then reveals itself to be just a phone. The brain adapts to its best features and stops noticing them. But that weekend coffee shop visit you've been looking forward to all week long? That's still a big deal for the brain.

Small, somewhat frequent rituals resist adaptation better than big-ticket purchases. Because no two experiences are exactly the same, the brain stays curious rather than settling into a rut. The secret is finding the 'Goldilocks zone': frequent enough to sustain happiness, but rare enough to remain a treat.

Take A Page from European Coffee Culture

If you’ve ever been to Paris, Rome, or really any European city, you’ll notice that people treat coffee (espresso) a little differently. They order at the counter, pay with cash, actually converse with the employees, and then sit down to enjoy their drink.

Sure, they may be desperately lacking in the iced coffee category (in the summer especially), but they easily make up for it in coffee culture.

The entire experience is intentionally slow and deliberate. It has been like this for generations, which means European citizens purposefully don’t let the process of buying an espresso become mundane.

Stateside, it’s the complete opposite: loyalty apps, mobile orders, DoorDash, and coffee on the run. Our desire for convenience and easy access facilitates emotionless consumption of our coffee.

Our pivot to impersonal consumption is really just an act of sensory deprivation. You’ve removed the anticipation, the scent of the coffee beans, and the human interaction — all things that tell our brain something special is happening. We’ve removed any and all friction from basically everything we enjoy, yet wonder why that enjoyment starts to feel flat.

Friction, it turns out, is the secret ingredient to joy. Our brain needs contrast in order to register an experience as an event instead of a default.

The Latte Factor Got the Villain Wrong

David Bach had the right idea in villainizing auto-pilot spending; however, he misdiagnosed the symptom. Purchasing coffee is a joyous experience for those who truly savor that specific, $6 sensory experience. Why would we villainize something that brings us joy? That’s like, the whole point of money.

Still, buying coffee should be a decision, not a reflex.

Daily purchase should certainly be addressed but not eliminated in its entirety. Depriving yourself of these small rituals creates frugality fatigue, a kind of pressure that builds until it releases as "revenge spending" on something much larger and less considered.³ The goal is intention, not elimination.

Fun Coffee Friday Works Like a Charm

Here's how I like the reframe the coffee argument: we want to protect the things we enjoy from becoming joyless habits.

Try something like this: make coffee at home four days a week, and save your favorite drink for Friday (or Thursday if it’s been a long week!). It’s not a punishment for poor spending habits. Instead, you are just building up anticipation for the ultimate payoff of having that delicious treat.

When “Fun Coffee Friday” comes around 52 times a year, take your time and order it at the counter. You are now intentionally present for the experience of buying a coffee.

Neuroscience backs this up. Stanford neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky found that when monkeys received a food reward every time they completed a task, dopamine spiked in anticipation. But when the reward came only half the time (unpredictably), their brains released twice as much dopamine. The guaranteed daily treat produced less pleasure than the occasional one.⁴
The same applies to buying coffee.

Same $6 treat, completely new perspective!

This is what I mean by intentionally using friction to prevent the brain from tuning out pleasure. You're designing your week around a small, reliable reward and protecting it from the adaptation that would otherwise kill it.

This obviously isn’t unique to coffee, either. Maybe it’s your favorite take-out restaurant. Maybe it’s a glass of wine or a cup of ice cream. Whatever it is, the key is not to ruin through overexposure.

When the Finance Nerds Are Right

A caveat worth making: if your rent, debt, or car payment is crushing you financially, optimizing the frequency of your coffee purchases isn’t worth much thought. Shrinking a car payment by $400 a month is the equivalent of cutting 80 lattes. It's not even the same playing field. Don't major in the minors.

The "Make it a Treat" principle works best when your fundamentals are in reasonable shape and you're trying to figure out how to actually enjoy the money you spend. It's a quality-of-life tool, not a financial rescue plan.

Conclusion

Instead of heeding the advice of the unnecessarily frugal, try spending less often on things you love for the purpose of loving them more.

This frame of mind protects small, pleasurable experiences from your brain's tendency to render them routinely mundane. It turns a habit back into a treat and it only costs a little patience.

This week, try picking one thing you consume on autopilot and put a few days between yourself and it. No need to eliminate it; just make it wait. See how your brain reacts when the payoff finally arrives.

Next in the Happy Money Series: The Secret to Maximizing The Joy We Derive From Travelling

More Reading:
Why Americans Are Still Grieving Over High Prices
Retirement Calculators Give You One Number. Reality Gives You a Range.
The Scarcity Mindset Is Costing You the Best Years of Your Retirement

References
¹ Frederick, S., & Loewenstein, G. (1999). Hedonic Adaptation. In D. Kahneman, E. Diener, & N. Schwarz (Eds.), Well-Being: The Foundations of Hedonic Psychology. Russell Sage Foundation.
² Dunn, E.W., Gilbert, D.T., & Wilson, T.D. (2011). If money doesn't make you happy, then you probably aren't spending it right. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 21, 115–125.
³ Sharma, E., & Alter, A.L. (2012). Financial deprivation selectively shifts moral standards and compromises moral decisions. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 119(2), 201–212.
⁴ Sapolsky, R.M. (2017). Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst. Penguin Press.

]]><![CDATA[Why Americans Are Still Grieving Over High Prices]]>Tue, 28 Apr 2026 07:00:00 GMThttps://www.thenewdiligence.com/blog/why-americans-are-still-grieving-over-high-pricesFrom denial to acceptance: A guide to moving through the five stages of grief during an inflation shock.

I recently walk into a Chase Bank branch, which, yes, is still a sentence in 2026. The teller I was talking with has a family of 4. While discussing the astronomical cost of raising kids in this day and age, he jokingly said “Every time I leave the house, it costs me $200”. While I'm sure he was embellishing a bit, the statement rings true for a lot of Americans.

Gas is $5/gallon. A casual dinner out for two means $100 with tip. Movie theatre tickets are $20 each (before concessions), and you can forget getting a decent seat at a live sporting event.

I mean I just bought a $30 polo from Target for goodness’ sake. What on earth happened?

Sadly...the prices we knew are gone.

The consumer price index has risen roughly 26% over the course of this decade¹. That's cumulative, and it's permanent. 5% inflation for services and healthcare. 3% inflation on goods. The sub 2% inflation of the 2010s is long gone.

Around 46% of Americans in a recent Politico survey said the cost of living is worse than ever². YouGov has tracked inflation as Americans' most important issue every year since 2022³.

What makes this dynamic even stranger: the economy, by most measures, is holding up. GDP grew 2% in 2025 despite everything thrown at it⁴. Unemployment has stayed near 4%. Private sector wages grew close to 4% year over year⁵. Leisure travel is booming. Many asset classes are hitting record highs. From a pure data standpoint, we should mostly feel better.

But that’s just not the case. Americans are still intensely grieving the prices of the past, and unable to fully move on.

The Five Stages of Inflation

In 1969, psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross outlined the five stages of grief as a way to understand how people process loss⁶. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. She may have been writing about mortality, but the framework maps cleanly onto microeconomics.

We’re mourning the version of our financial lives that thrived in the low inflation, high employment era that existed before 2021. The prices, the affordability, and the budgeting plans built around these assumptions, are gone. We’ve been moving through these stages of grief ever since, some faster than others, most of us stuck somewhere in the middle.

Stage 1: Denial

"This is temporary. Prices will come back down."

In 2021 and early 2022, denial was the dominant narrative among economists, policymakers, and every day citizens. Inflation was "transitory” and supply chains would sort themselves out. The Fed would tweak rates and things would normalize. “Just wait and see”.

This is optimism bias at work — our tendency to believe that negative conditions won’t apply to us. We often expect a reversion to the mean, especially when the mean has been stable for a long time. After nearly two decades of 2% inflation following the 2008 financial crisis, our brains could hardly imagine a world where that wasn't still the baseline.

Chipotle Menu Board from 2017

Stage 2: Anger

"Why does my Chipotle burrito cost $13? This is insane!"

By mid-2022, denial had given way to anger. Grocery hauls that used to cost $100 were coming out at $150. Restaurant checks felt genuinely insulting. Discretionary dollars got squeezed to the margin. Shrinkflation went mainstream.

The behavioral concept here is loss aversion. Research from Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky found that losses register in the brain with roughly twice the emotional intensity of equivalent gains⁷.

This is why wage growth, even if it technically keeps pace with prices at the aggregate level, fails to fully register in our brains. The pay raise does register as a gain, but price increases register as an asymmetrically larger loss.

Stage 3: Bargaining

"I’ll shop at Aldi instead of whole foods. I’ll cut some subscriptions. I’ll cook more at home."

This is where many still lie on the grief spectrum. Bargaining can be productive, up to a point. You may find real savings by trading down on brands and renegotiating bills, but the deterioration in quality can wear on you after a while.

At some point, the mental gymnastics and constant problem-solving are just a way to feel in control without confronting the bigger picture. If your saving habits were built around a cost of living that no longer exists, no amount of budgeting optimization is going to let you catch up.

Stage 4: Depression

"Everything costs too much and my paycheck doesn't go far enough. Who do I blame for this?"

This is where a meaningful share of Americans are sitting right now as evidenced by these YouGov and Gallup Surveys.

Financial stress can lead to a kind of financial despondency, a sense that the game has changed in ways that can't be fixed and can't be adapted to.

The behavioral concept here is learned helplessness, a term from psychology that describes what happens when repeated exposure to uncontrollable negative outcomes causes people to stop trying to improve their situation, even when they could⁸.

After years of watching prices rise, watching the "temporary" narrative collapse, watching wages struggle to play catch-up, some have simply disengaged.

Retirement contributions get paused, planning conversations get deferred, and the future feels too expensive to think about clearly.

This stage is where money illusion does the most damage. We anchor hard to nominal prices (the dollar amounts we remember paying, like in the chipotle photo example) and every new price gets measured against that anchor.

The old price feels like the correct price, and everything since feels like being overcharged. That anchoring causes exhaustion and financial depression. With every new purchase comes financial fatigue.

Stage 5: Acceptance

"This is the world now. How can I adjust my plan to take advantage of it?"

This is where you want to end up, and where relatively few Americans have landed. Don’t mistake acceptance for resignation — this is much different than giving up. Instead, it’s just a brain update where you ditch the anchor that’s weighing you down to match a new reality and begin to think constructively.

The $12 lunch is now $17. Are we unhappy about it? Of course! But this is what lunch costs now. Whether that means earning more, spending differently, or rethinking the plan entirely — something has to give, and waiting for the price to come back down isn't an option.

This is obviously much easier said than done. Anchoring is one of the most persistent cognitive biases in behavioral finance⁹. Reference points are extremely stubborn, and the brain doesn't release them just because you decide it should.

Establishing a new anchor takes discipline in the same fashion that nostalgia can weigh us down whether we want it to or not. In some cases, it takes working through the many stages of grief rather than skipping to acceptance through willpower alone.

The practical version of acceptance looks like this: not waiting for prices to fall before making a financial decision, not deferring the retirement conversation until inflation “cools off more," not sitting on cash waiting for an economy that feels more comfortable.

Your financial plan either works in a 3-4% inflation environment or it doesn't. If not, it's time to make a change.

Most of Us Are Still Somewhere in the Middle

My honest diagnosis is that most Americans are somewhere between the anger and depression stage, often oscillating between the two depending on the week. It's a very reasonable response to a period of significant economic disruption that hit fast, has lasted longer than expected, and left a permanent mark on our wallets.

Acknowledging this grief is the first step toward actually moving on from it.

So What Do You Do Now?

Practically speaking, two things

1. Be aware of the stage you're actually in. If you're still angry, that's fine; but anger isn't a financial strategy. If you're in bargaining mode, it's worth asking whether the optimizations you're making are addressing the real structural issues in your financial plan or just creating the feeling of control. If you've gone quiet, if you've stopped making decisions because the whole thing feels pointless, that's the depression stage, and financial paralysis has a cost.

2. It’s time to update your anchors. This is something I still heavily struggle with…The prices we remember from 2017 are not a useful benchmark anymore. All they do is create bitterness.

Every time you catch yourself thinking "this used to cost X," that's the anchoring bias talking, and it keeps us stuck in the mud. Evaluate decisions based on what things cost now, not what you wish they cost.

Acceptance is building a plan that works in the world as it is. That's always been the job in personal finance.

The cost of living is now permanently higher and it sure. The question now: What are you going to do about it?

More Reading:
Retirement Calculators Give You One Number. Reality Gives You a Range.
The Scarcity Mindset Is Costing You the Best Years of Your Retirement
Your Body Has a Retirement Plan. It Probably Doesn’t Match Your Financial One

Return to Blog

References
¹ U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Consumer Price Index Summary.
² Politico/Morning Consult Poll, Cost of Living Survey, 2025.
³ YouGov, The Economist/YouGov Poll: Most Important Issues Facing the Country, 2022–2025.
⁴ IMF Executive Board, 2026 Article IV Consultation with the United States, April 2026.
⁵ Deloitte Insights, US Economic Forecast Q1 2026.
⁶ Kübler-Ross, E. (1969). On Death and Dying. Macmillan.
⁷ Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1979). Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision Under Risk. Econometrica, 47(2), 263–291.
⁸ Seligman, M.E.P. (1972). Learned Helplessness. Annual Review of Medicine, 23(1), 407–412.
⁹ Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1974). Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases. Science, 185(4157), 1124–1131.

]]><![CDATA[Retirement Calculators Give You One Number. Reality Gives You a Range.]]>Tue, 21 Apr 2026 15:24:28 GMThttps://www.thenewdiligence.com/blog/retirement-calculators-give-you-one-number-reality-gives-you-a-rangeThe standard retirement calculator gives you a simple output and a false sense of certainty. The reality, hidden inside that 7% CAGR assumption, is a wide distribution of outcomes that can span millions of dollars. How timing luck can shape your retirement balance regardless of how well you saved.

Meet two retirees. We’ll name them Linda and Mark.

Linda retired at the end of 2008. Mark retired at the end of 1999. Both worked for 40 years. Both contributed the same amount to their 401(k)s. Both invested in a basic S&P 500 index fund. Neither panic-sold during crashes nor tried to time the market. They simply just invested their savings in their retirement accounts for the entire span of their careers.

Linda finished with roughly $1.52M in today's dollars. Mark finished with roughly $4.97M. Same strategy, same discipline, same 40-year horizon, and a $3.45M gap between them.

The only variable difference was the years they started and ended their careers.

Now, go open any standard retirement calculator. Plug in their identical inputs: same contributions, same 40-year horizon, same 7% average assumed return. The calculator will spit out one number for both investors. It has no way of telling you that there is a wide range of outcomes somewhere between $1.52M and $4.97M, and that where you land inside that range is drastically attributable to the whims of the stock market.

It's a structural problem with how retirement planning is oversimplified in its presentation. It only gets worse when you layer on what the behavioral research says about how people like Linda and Mark actually behave during their careers.

The Math Problem: A Point Estimate Hiding a Distribution

The typical retirement calculator works like this: pick a CAGR (usually 7-8%), a contribution rate, and a time horizon. Multiply it all out. Get a number.

While these calculators do a great job at illustrating the magic of compound interest, they have some major flaws. The main problem is that nobody actually earns 7% every year for 40 years. They earn -37% in one year and +32% in another, in a sequence they don't get to choose. And that sequence is monumentally important.

To quantify this, I ran the numbers across every 40-year rolling window of S&P 500 total returns ending between 1999 and 2025. For each window I modeled a realistic career contribution curve: $5,000/year in your 20s, $10,000 in your 30s, $18,000 in your 40s, and $22,000 in your 50s, all in 2025 dollars. That's closer to how most savers actually do it —contributions that scale with income.

Here's what the 27 different retirement cohorts ended up with:

Source: Factset
*Disclaimer: A 100% equity portfolio isn't what most people hold for 40 straight years, but the S&P is the visible anchor most savers use as a mental benchmark. And for younger investors, it's increasingly close to their actual allocation. A 70/30 portfolio would dampen the spread shown above, but the directional point would be the same: same saver, same discipline, wildly different outcomes depending on when they started.

Every one of those gray-and-blue lines is a real 40-year period that a real saver lived through. The orange line is the average.

A few things jump out:

1. The endpoints aren't close. Linda's 2008 cohort lands at $1.52M. Mark's 1999 cohort lands at $4.97M. The average is $2.40M. That's a 3.26x ratio between the luckiest and unluckiest cohorts, on identical saver behavior.

2. The divergence is a late-career story. All the timelines stay clustered for the first 25 or 30 years, then they fan out dramatically. This is pre-retirement sequence-of-return risk made visible (as opposed to the much more popular post-retirement sequence-of-return risk).

3. Returns in your 50s and early 60s matter far more than returns in your 20s, because that's when the account balance is largest. A 30% year on a $1M balance produces a much bigger dollar swing than a 30% year on $100K.

What’s also key to note is that Linda did everything right, but she had terrible timing luck. She contributed $550K (in 2025 dollars) over 40 years of disciplined saving. She stayed in through the 1987 crash, the 1990 recession, and the dot-com bust. Then in 2008, right before she planned to retire, about 40% of her peak balance evaporated. There was no time for her balance to recover.

What Calculator Models Don’t Factor In: Human Behavior

Most critiques of retirement calculators stop at sequence risk. The advice is "run a Monte Carlo simulation," and it’s presumed to be enough. But there's another layer I want to talk about.

In 2011, UC Berkeley economists Ulrike Malmendier and Stefan Nagel (GO BEARS!) published a paper in the Quarterly Journal of Economics called "Depression Babies: Do Macroeconomic Experiences Affect Risk-Taking?" Their finding was that lifetime experiences of the stock market shape how much people are willing to invest in it for decades afterward.

Came of age in a strong market? You stay more aggressive for the rest of your life. Came of age in a weak one? You stay permanently conservative.

A 2019 follow-up by Malmendier, Demian Pouzo, and Victoria Vanasco formalized this into an equilibrium model they call experience-based learning. Using Survey of Consumer Finance data from 1960 through 2013, they showed two things:

People with better lifetime market experiences hold higher stock allocations, both on the extensive margin (whether they own stocks at all) and the intensive margin (what share of their liquid assets is in the market).
Younger people react more strongly to a given shock than older people, because the same crash is a bigger fraction of their total market memory.

Which means the retirement calculator's built-in assumption, that savers are interchangeable robots who contribute smoothly and rebalance rationally, doesn't hold up against the data.

In our example, Linda doesn't just end up with less money than Mark. She also ends up with a completely different frame of mind as an investor.

She watched two ugly bear markets bookend her working life (2000–02 and 2007–09). The research says she was statistically more likely to pull back from equities after 2008, lock in her losses, and miss a big chunk of the recovery. Mark's career was defined by the greatest bull run in American history. He stayed in. He probably leaned in further (to his demise), reinforced by decades of wins that confirmed his prior beliefs.

My point is: every investor behaves in a different manner based on their experiences and biases. This fact can’t possibly be baked into the assumptions of a typical retirement calculator.

My Problem with the One-Number Output

When a calculator tells you "you'll have $2.4M at 65," the result is sitting behind too many unrealistic assumptions.

The calculator can't tell you:

What the market will be like in the 5-10 years leading up to your retirement. (This matters more than almost any other input.)
How you'll behave during a drawdown, which is shaped by market experiences that haven't happened to you yet.
How your contribution schedule interacts with market timing. (It can amplify or dampen the luck factor in ways that are hard to see in advance.)
What your withdrawal sequence will look like once you retire, and whether a bear market in year one will permanently impair the portfolio.
What the number look like in today’s dollar value

I understand why the tool exists. Simplification is probably the whole point of a calculator. The issue is how the output gets framed to the user: a single number looks like a prediction when the math underneath supports a wide range of outcomes.

How to Improve Your Own Retirement Calculator

The goal is to shift from "hit the target number" to "plan for the range."

1. Run Monte Carlo simulations, not just averages. A good Monte Carlo tool will tell you something like "70% chance your ending balance lands between $X and $Y." That's more useful than any single projection. It's not be-all and end-all though, as it doesn't adjust to the underlying return environment you actually experience. That's why this tool must be combined with other tools to completely stress test poor timing luck.

2. Stress-test against a bad sequence. Useful thought experiment: what if I retired in 1966, or 2000, or 2008? Those are three of the worst-sequence starts in modern history. If your plan can absorb Linda’s outcome without you running out of money, it can handle almost any realistic futures.

3. Build flexibility directly into the plan (my favorite). Dynamic withdrawal strategies like the guardrail strategy adjust your spending based on how the portfolio is actually doing, rather than blindly withdrawing a flat percentage whether the market is up 30% or down 30%. Being willing to delay retirement by a year or two, or trim discretionary spending in a bad year, or pick up part-time work early on, are all hedges against bad timing luck.

4. Know your own behavioral tendencies. If you’re someone that sold in March 2020, you're likely to do it again next time. You can plan around this knowledge. It may mean keeping your allocation conservative enough that the next drawdown doesn't scare you out. It also may mean automating decisions so your panicked self can't touch the portfolio at the wrong moment. Your behavior under stress is crucial to understand.

5. Use the calculator as a starting point, not an answer. Just remember the number they give you is (at best) the midpoint of a very wide distribution. A real financial plan builds outward from that midpoint.

Conclusion

The comforting oversimplification retirement calculators sell is that a disciplined saver ends up with a predictable outcome using the power of compound interest.

The same saver, doing everything right for 40 years, might end up with millions of dollars less at the end of their career depending on the year (or decade) of retirement. Add the behavioral research and the gap could grow even bigger, especially post-retirement!

A good financial plan accepts the range, prepares for the bad sequences, and gives your future self the flexibility to adapt to whichever version of the market happens to show up. The single number a retirement calculator gives you is the average of every line on that chart; however, nobody retires on the average, but on one specific timeline.

More Reading:
The Scarcity Mindset Is Costing You the Best Years of Your Retirement
Your Body Has a Retirement Plan. It Probably Doesn’t Match Your Financial One
The Trip Is Non-Negotiable, But the Experience Depends on Your Financial Reality

Return to Blog

References
1. Malmendier, U. and Nagel, S. (2011). "Depression Babies: Do Macroeconomic Experiences Affect Risk-Taking?" Quarterly Journal of Economics 126, 373–416.
2. Malmendier, U., Pouzo, D., and Vanasco, V. (2019). "Investor Experiences and Financial Market Dynamics." Working paper.
3. Historical S&P 500 total return data from Robert Shiller's online dataset.

]]><![CDATA[The Scarcity Mindset Is Costing You the Best Years of Your Retirement]]>Tue, 14 Apr 2026 07:00:00 GMThttps://www.thenewdiligence.com/blog/the-scarcity-mindset-is-costing-you-the-best-years-of-your-retirementThe fear of running out of money often results in an overly conservative retirement plan. The flat-line spending model doesn't properly reflect the math behind a typical retirement spending glide path. Here's what the research suggests we do instead.

Open up almost any retirement planning tool, run a projection, and 99% of the time you’ll see a flat withdrawal rate (usually 4%) from 65 to 90, adjusted for inflation. It’s predictable and tidy.

It's also entirely oversimplified. The problem with the flat withdrawal rate is that it implies you, at 65, will have the same spending behavior as you at 85.

Do you think you’ll have the same appetite for life, same desire to travel, same interest in a new car, same urge to go out for a drink at these vastly different ages?

Probably not, right? Aging is dynamic. Every stage of life looks very different at its beginning versus its end.

When your financial plan is built on a flat line, the math often tells you there's a crisis looming at 90 that demands significant restraint today. The result is a scarcity mindset that isn't entirely reflective of your evolving financial wants and needs.

A 2022 National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) working paper tracked real household spending data across thousands of Americans and came to this conclusion about retirement withdrawal projections: spending naturally declines with age at roughly 1–2% per year in real terms. The decline is consistent, spans all educational backgrounds, and holds for both singles and couples. Take a look at the below chart from the study.

Many of the participants’ spending patterns either decreased or stayed the same. However, even if you spend the same amount over time (or even slightly more), it equates to a decline in spending once adjusted for inflation.

This small implication can make a substantial difference for financial plans. If you follow the norm and plan for a flat line, but life follows a declining spend glide path, you're accumulating for a level of consumption your 80-year-old self won't care to spend. In the process, you're constraining the version of yourself that could actually benefit from it.

Utility Is a Moving Target

A dollar’s utility has a contextual value based on what it can produce for you in any given moment.

The NBER study asked respondents to rate how much their enjoyment of various spending-related activities had changed over a six-year period. The categories included eating out, traveling, leisure activities, new clothes, a new car, new appliances, and giving financial support to family.

The pattern that emerged? Enjoyment of almost every category declined with age, with travel and leisure showing the sharpest drop. The decline accelerated the older the participants got.

By the time respondents reached 85 and older, their reported enjoyment of travel had fallen nearly a full point on the rating scale compared to those in their early 60s. The researchers found that health outlook was the primary constraint, not finances.

I want to reflect on this finding. The decline in marginal utility from travel wasn't because people couldn't afford it, but because they weren’t healthy enough to fully enjoy it.

A trip to the Swiss Alps at 65 is a completely different asset than a trip to the Swiss Alps at 85. At 65, that trip represents a long-deferred dream: the energy to walk/hike, the mobility to explore, the physical capacity to fully inhabit the experience. In the 80-85 range, however, the trip may not even be physically feasible. The dollar amount is identical (adjusted for inflation), but the utility is not.

This is why front-loading experiences in your prime retirement years is mathematically feasible and economically rational. You are deploying resources when they produce the highest return. Saving them for later erodes their value.

The Satisfaction Safety Net

If spending naturally declines with age and people are cutting back on the things they used to love due to depreciating health, you might expect older Americans to report feeling more financial stress as they age.

Wrong. The research found the opposite.

The study found that roughly 18% of those in their late 50s reported being completely or very satisfied with their financial situation. By the time respondents crossed 80, that number had climbed to around 43%. The fraction reporting dissatisfaction followed the mirror image, falling sharply with age.

On the question of financial constraints, the same pattern was held. Older respondents were more likely to report feeling unconstrained or only slightly constrained, and less likely to report feeling "very constrained," compared to those nearing retirement age.

In other words, your future self (the person your savings are protecting) will very likely be more satisfied with less. Their desires will have changed. The things they need to feel comfortable and secure will cost less, not more.

The fear of being broke near the end of life is real and worth taking seriously; however, the data says the version of you that arrives there will almost certainly be happier with less.

Practical Application: How to Adjust the Plan

Instead of projecting flat inflation-adjusted spending from 65 to 95, model a 1–2% annual real decline in discretionary spending starting around age 75 (YMMV).

Keep healthcare as a separate, potentially rising line item, as that category genuinely does increase significantly with age. But for everything else (travel, entertainment, dining, leisure, etc.) model it the way the data suggests.

When you run that projection, two things happen:

1. The math substantially changes. A declining spending path requires meaningfully less capital to sustain over a 30-year retirement than a flat one.

2. There’s much clearer optionality. When your plan explicitly models lower discretionary spending in later years, you can see, with clarity, what's available to spend in the early years.
These numbers are a general outline based on common age breaks. But individual health is the ultimate gatekeeper of how you experience retirement.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about how biological aging happens in sudden bursts (one around age 44, another around 60). The NBER paper adds to that: enjoyment of travel and leisure declines most sharply with health deterioration as opposed to financial constraints.

The practical implication is that spending on experiences sooner, while health allows it, is a reasonable hedge against capability risk, the one variable that no financial plan can fully protect.

The Confidence Anchor

Before hammering home some final points, I want to clarify the call to action here.

I’m not advocating for reckless spending. This isn't a permission slip to blow your retirement savings on a whim and hope the math works out. The psychological freedom to front-load your retirement spending — to be more aggressive in your early years — depends entirely on having a plan that's been stress-tested for longevity, healthcare costs, and sequence-of-return risk.

A good retirement plan is the infrastructure that lets you stop worrying. I’m not talking back-of-the-napkin numbers here. I’m talking about a well-laid-out and plan that allows you to spend with confidence. Without it, the fear of running out will always win, no matter how clearly the data suggests otherwise.

Exceptions To These Rules

The discussed glided path suggestion obscures the reality for people whose story looks different.

Here’s a few scenarios where the proposed retirement glide path breaks down:

1. The 20% who don't follow the declining spending script. The NBER study found that while financial satisfaction increases with age for the majority, roughly 20% of those over 80 reported not being satisfied with their financial situation.

For this group, the spending decline represented a significant constraint. Whatever combination of inadequate savings, adverse health events, or unexpected costs put them there, the outcome is real financial stress at an age when options are limited.

This is exactly the risk a good financial plan is designed to prevent, and it's a reminder that the declining consumption glide path is only usable if the foundation underneath it is solid.

2. The long-term care wildcard. As I mentioned previously, healthcare spending is the one budget category that reliably moves in the opposite direction to most everything else. The average nursing home stay runs well over $90,000 a year, likely even more in population centers. A multi-year cognitive decline requiring memory care can exhaust even a well-funded retirement plan.

My argument for spending more early in retirement assumes that healthcare is a separate, explicitly modeled line item rather than folding it into the general "spending will decline" assumption.

3. The people who genuinely enjoy watching the balance grow. For some people, watching the number grow is the utility. The security it represents, the optionality it preserves, the identity it reflects. For others, leaving a substantial legacy is their primary goal, and there isn’t anything wrong with that.

4. The people who just live simply. Some people arrive at retirement having already figured out that their deepest sources of satisfaction don't cost much. They cook at home because they love it. They keep the old RV because it takes them exactly where they want to go. Their idea of a great weekend is a couple of days camping with their grandchildren and a good book. No need to match someone else’s definition of a good retirement

My point is: this article is not a mandate to spend more than you want or to take risks that aren't adequately backstopped. Know which category you're in before you decide what to do with the data.

Conclusion: Don't Save the Best for Last

There's a version of retirement that almost nobody plans for and that many people end up living/regretting: one where the best years of retirement were spent being overly cautious.

For the majority of retirees, the arc of retirement reflects a shrinking footprint of desires, where satisfaction increases even as spending decreases.

The take home?

The window where your money and your body are both working in your favor is shorter than many financial plans acknowledge. If you focus on maximizing the years when intentional spending produces the most life utility, you’ll avoid paying the price for a risk that never materializes.

Plan accordingly and your future self will be just fine.

Return to Blog

References:
1. Rohwedder, Hurd & Hudomiet, "Explanations for the Decline in Spending at Older Ages," NBER Working Paper No. 30460, September 2022.

]]><![CDATA[Why Investors Are So Quick to Turn Bearish]]>Tue, 07 Apr 2026 07:00:00 GMThttps://www.thenewdiligence.com/blog/why-investors-are-so-quick-to-turn-bearishA 5% market dip is one of the most normal events in investing. So why does it reliably send sentiment off a cliff?

Every market drawdown, you'll see the same red banner headline: “Stocks sell off as Wall Street worries about X”.

The S&P 500 drops 4–5% from a recent high, and the tone notably shifts. Pundits start talking about caution, allocations get “reassessed,” and risk becomes the focus.

Scroll through investment forums and it sounds even worse: “Bear market incoming”. “Market is officially broken”. “The smart money got out weeks ago”. Somebody always has a thesis.

What makes this so remarkable is how routine the trigger is.

Since 1980, the S&P 500 has declined 5% or more in 93% of all calendar years.¹ These dips occur 4-5 times per year on average.² The event that sends investors into crisis mode is, statistically speaking, closer to a scheduled occurrence than a warning signal.

Yet, sentiment data shows the same thing over and over: bearishness spikes quickly and sharply the moment one of these pullbacks arrives.

Why do these dips always feel so worrying? Why is our emotional response so consistently out of proportion to what the data suggests?

Volatility is a Part of Investing

Total # of 5%, 10%, 20%, 30%, 40%, 50% drawdowns in the S&P 500

Since 1950

Total # of drawdowns (since 1950)

Source:Factset

Flaws in the Brain

The most direct answer to these questions is our brains. Here's what is going on:

Loss Aversion
In the late 1970s, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky documented the finding that losses register psychologically at roughly twice the intensity of equivalent gains.³

This means a 5% drop registers more like a 10% drop than a 5% drop. It feels bigger, more threatening, and more urgent than it actually is.
While this natural instinct proved useful for human survival, it just doesn't have a productive outlet in a retirement account.

Recency Bias
This is the brain's tendency to treat the most recent data as the most predictive. After a few consecutive down days, investors start to see a trend emerge — “evidence” that something has fundamentally shifted. And it’s a snowball effect.

The brain essentially pattern-matches on the only data that feels relevant right now, which just so happens to be the most negative data the market has seen in several months.

Herding
Now layer in how information spreads in this day and age.

Open Reddit, X, or the comments on a financial news article during a pullback. What you're seeing is not a representative sample of investor opinion. In a declining market, the most activated voices are almost always the most fearful. Fear, in a crowd, gains steam and notoriety faster than any other signal available.

The Silicon Valley Bank collapse in March 2023 is the most dramatic illustration of this dynamic on record. Depositors pulled $42 billion in a single day (roughly $1 million per second) after concerns spread rapidly across Twitter.⁴ For context, the previous largest bank run in modern American history, at Washington Mutual in 2008, took ten full days to accumulate $16.7 billion in withdrawals.

Social media may not have invented panic, but it certainly compressed the timeline from days into hours.

Sentiment Moves Faster Than the Market Does

The American Association of Individual Investors has surveyed retail investors every single week since 1987. The question is simple: do you expect markets to be higher or lower six months from now? The historical average for bearish responses is around 31%.⁵

What the data consistently reveals is that bearish readings can surge 15 to 20 percentage points in a single week, well before there's any evidence that a routine pullback is becoming a more serious price correction.⁶ The market moves down a few percent and sentiment drops like a rock.

When Negativity Leads to Bad Decisions

When our outlook gets too negative and we decide to fly to safety (i.e. move to cash), we are actively deciding to miss out on experiencing the market’s best days.

According to JP Morgan's research, a $10,000 investment held fully from July 2004 through July 2024 returned 10.5% annually.⁷

Miss the 10 best days? → 6.2% annually
Miss the 20 best days? → 3.6% annually
Miss the 30 best days? → 1.4% annually

The Cost of Missing the Market's Best Days

Growth of $10,000 invested in the S&P 500 — July 2004 to July 2024 — 7 of the 10 best days occurred within 15 days of the 10 worst days

Source: J.P. Morgan Asset Management, Morningstar Direct. S&P 500 Total Return Index. For illustrative purposes only.

This is what makes reactive selling so destructive.

Even though selling risk assets feels protective in the moment, it’s typically a mistake in the long run. The math on missing even a handful of those great days in the market is significant.

The Counterargument Worth Taking Seriously

To be clear: not every pullback resolves quickly, and not every bearish instinct is wrong.
Pullbacks can become corrections, and corrections can turn into drawn-out bear markets. I’m not going to dismiss fear for the sake of ignoring real risk.

Here’s a more precise framing: a 5% decline carries very little statistical information about what follows it. The average recovery from a 5-10% correction is approximately three months. ⁸ Most years that include a double-digit intra-year drop still finish positive.

The mistake is treating a single chapter like the entire book. Just because we drop 5% doesn’t mean we’re doomed to experience a 20% drawdown.

Conclusion

Loss aversion is real. Recency bias is real. Herding is Real. The fear and anxiety that a small decline turns into something worse is real.

But is it statistically justified after a few percentage point drop? Not so much.

Since 1980, the average intra-year decline has been around 14%, while the average annual return has been 13%.⁹

Dips and recoveries are two parts of the same story. The investors who sit through the full story tend to come out ahead. The ones who act on their fear, especially when that fear is being amplified in real time by others, tend not to.

If you can filter out the sea of coordinated emotional experiences dressed up as analysis, you’re more likely to succeed in long-term investing.

More Reading:
Your Body Has a Retirement Plan. It Probably Doesn’t Match Your Financial One.
The Trip Is Non-Negotiable, But the Experience Depends on Your Financial Reality
Many People Don't Need to Hire a Financial Planner. Here's How to Know If You're the Exception.

Back to Blog

References:
¹ Fidelity Investments — A Game Plan for Market Corrections
² Covenant Wealth Advisors — Understanding Stock Market Corrections and Crashes
³ Kahneman, D. and Tversky, A. Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision Under Risk, Econometrica, 1979
⁴ American Action Forum — The Collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, March 2023
⁵ American Association of Individual Investors (AAII) Sentiment Survey, historical averages
⁶ Advisorpedia — Surging Bearish Sentiment: A Warning Sign or Overreaction?, 2025
⁷ J.P. Morgan Asset Management, Morningstar Direct. S&P 500 Total Return Index, July 2004–July 2024
⁸ Invesco — Stock Market Corrections and What Investors Should Know
⁹ Fidelity Investments — A Game Plan for Market Corrections

]]><![CDATA[Your Body Has a Retirement Plan. It Probably Doesn’t Match Your Financial One.]]>Tue, 31 Mar 2026 07:00:00 GMThttps://www.thenewdiligence.com/blog/your-body-has-a-retirement-plan-it-probably-doesnt-match-your-financial-oneResearch from Stanford Medicine reveals that aging happens in sudden shifts — not gradual decline. Here is a roadmap for deciding when your money should be used when factoring in good health.

When Your Body Peaks vs When Your Money Peaks

I’ve sat across from a lot of people who spent their financial lives doing everything right. They contributed significantly to their 401(k). They stayed the course through volatile markets. They deferred and saved and planned.

Then, they retired at 65 and watched their nest egg continue to grow; the habit of not spending had calcified into the default mode of their lives.

What most current and prospective retirees don’t know, and what many financial plans don’t factor in, is that there’s a risk in financial planning that doesn’t show up in projections or Monte Carlo simulations:

Capability Risk, or the risk that your wealth arrives after your ability to fully use it.

Money compounds, but your ability to enjoy it doesn’t.

Aging Is Non-Linear

In August 2024, researchers at Stanford Medicine published a study in Nature Aging that tracked more than 135,000 different molecules and microbes across 108 people from age 25 to 75.¹ The finding? That humans don’t age at a steady rate. Instead, we undergo two distinct periods of rapid, dramatic biological change: one centered at approximately age 44, and another around age 60.

Around age 44: significant shifts in molecules related to cardiovascular disease, alcohol and caffeine metabolism, and muscle and skin function. This happened in both men and women.

Around age 60: a second wave affecting immune regulation, kidney function, carbohydrate metabolism, and cardiovascular disease risk. This is also when the risk of Alzheimer’s disease and heart failure begins to rise sharply rather than gradually.

The takeaway is that aging isn’t liner, it happens in bursts. Our financial plans, on the other hand, are built as if aging were a gentle slope.

Why This Changes the Retirement Conversation

The traditional retirement planning framework looks something like this: save heavily in your 20s, 30s, and 40s, retire somewhere in your 60s, and spend down your nest egg for the following 20 or 30 years.

The problem is that this model treats your retirement years as if they’re biologically uniform when they aren’t.

A dollar spent on a trip to the Alps at 63 is not the same as a dollar spent on the same trip at 73, in terms of financial value or in terms of the experience itself. Your biology is the limiting component, and unlike your portfolio, it depreciates instead of compounding.

How to Adjust Your Frame of Mind on Retirement

The gap between how long you live, and how long you live well is significant. Lifespan is rising globe-wide, but health-adjusted life expectancies are not keeping pace.

Longevity ≠ Healthy Living

In the United States, the average person spends 12.4 years of their life in poor health — managing chronic illness, pain, or disability.²

That means that if you retire at 65 and live to 85, the years between 65 and 73 are your prime window for deploying resources toward the retirement you actually envisioned. By 73, meaningful decline in health capacity has begun for most people.

What does that mean? Don’t kick the can on your bucket list.

Intentionally spending your hard-earned assets (with care) at the start of retirement is insurance against becoming the wealthiest person in the graveyard.

Mapping Your Financial Plan to Biology

Stage 1: Ages 25–44│Build aggressively. Live intentionally.
For those fortunate enough to have their health, your body is arguably your most valuable asset in this stage of life. However, it’s an asset with a depreciating value.

The financial priority here is clear: build, accumulate, and create a strong foundation. Maximize retirement contributions, eliminate high-interest debt, and put your future on solid footing.

But this is also where capability risk begins to be a factor.

Some experiences have a shelf life, and the cost of waiting is significant. Three days at Coachella, a backpacking trip in the Sierra, or training for a triathlon are activities that require a body in its prime. These are time sensitive.

Phase 2: Ages 44–60│Protect your health. Front-load the active years
You’ve crossed the age 44 cliff, so the hangovers are brutal, but you’re still a capable human.

No need to fret about age, but it IS time to focus on what is most important to you.

The right financial moves here:
• Increase investment in preventive health
• Shift from accumulation to preservation in the 5-7 years before retirement
• Evaluate career optionality
• Seriously think about what you want retirement to look like

The right physical moves here:
• Build good exercise habits
• Curb excessive alcohol and caffeine intake.
• Be more intentional with recovery, sleep, and nutrition

Good physical habit formation in this stage of life can have a meaningful impact on when (and how sharply) you experience the next biological shift.

Also, as previously mentioned, don’t keep deferring the bucket-list items that require physical capacity. Your body is still your ally, but the margin is narrowing. Take those physically demanding vacations with family or friends while you’re still working. Use those vacation days!

The benefits are two-fold: you still have your health, and you don’t have to worry about supplementing income with your nest egg.

Phase 3: Ages 60–70│The golden window. Spend intentionally.
This is the most underappreciated phase in retirement planning, and the one most likely to be wasted.

You’ve just crossed the second biological cliff, so your health is beginning to slowly deteriorate. However, you still very likely have energy, mobility, and cognitive sharpness.

Your financial capacity and physical capability are both still reasonably high.

This is the window where capability risk matters most. This is the retirement sweet spot.

And yet, this is where many retirees hesitate. They spend decades learning how to accumulate, and then struggle to reverse this instinct. They live off income, preserve the principal, and wait for a future that doesn’t offer the same return on experience.

The Stanford Medicine research gives us a framework (and permission) to front-load experiences and deploy capital in the early retirement years. Not to a reckless extent of course, but deliberately.

Phase 4: Ages 70+│Shift from experiences to comfort, care, and legacy.
At this stage, the constraints become more visible. Over time, the range of what your time, energy, and mobility allow you to do begins to narrow.

This doesn’t mean you’re not allowed to travel or spend money during this stage. It means the type of spending that creates value evolves.

Experiences that once required physical capacity may become less practical. In their place, comfort, convenience, and care take on greater importance.

For many, this is also where spending becomes more outward-facing. Helping children, supporting family, giving intentionally, etc...

Effectively planning for this stage (including having health care options funded before you need them) is one of the most generous things you can do for yourself and your loved ones.

Conclusion

We spend so much energy in this profession optimizing portfolios for the financial risks of retirement. Sequence-of-return risk, inflation risk, longevity risk, portfolio risk.

But capability risk deserves a seat at the head of the table.

A better question to ask:
What experiences require a version of you that won’t exist in ten years?

Those don’t belong on a 'someday' list, they belong in the early part of your life plan.

The Stanford research is a reminder that our bodies don’t give us unlimited time to figure out what we actually want to spend our money on.

The biological cliffs are real.
The capability window is finite.

Don’t worry about maximizing the account balance on your last day. Instead, map out a financial plan that aligns your money with the ability to experience it.

More Reading:
The Trip Is Non-Negotiable, But the Experience Depends on Your Financial Reality
Six Months, 28 Posts, and a Newborn
Many People Don't Need to Hire a Financial Planner. Here's How to Know If You're the Exception.

Back to Blog

References
¹ Lehallier, B., et al. (2024). Nonlinear dynamics of multi-omics profiles during human aging. Nature Aging. Reported by Stanford Medicine.
² Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion. (2023). Health-Adjusted Life Expectancy (HALE) Data. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

]]><![CDATA[The Trip Is Non-Negotiable, But the Experience Depends on Your Financial Reality]]>Tue, 24 Mar 2026 07:00:00 GMThttps://www.thenewdiligence.com/blog/the-trip-is-non-negotiable-but-the-experience-depends-on-your-realityHow Travel Became a Protected Expense in a Fragmented Economy

Have you been to an airport lately?

Lines at security, crowded gates, flight after flight going out full. It feels like this century's Roaring 20s, an unexpected dynamic in an economy that, by most traditional measures, appears to be slowing down.

Anecdotal as it may be, the crowding reflects a meaningful shift in how households are spending their discretionary dollars. Experiences, especially travel, have moved to the top of the priority list.

There are several possible explanations: a post-pandemic reordering of priorities, the relentless visual pressure of social media status, or simply a growing acceptance of what psychologists have argued for years — that experiences tend to deliver more lasting satisfaction than material goods.

I'll leave the cause for another day to focus on the outcome: travel has moved out of the discretionary bucket and into something that feels closer to a personal necessity.

That thesis is becoming increasingly visible in company reporting. Even as consumer sentiment reflects ongoing concern around inflation, unemployment, and broader economic conditions, the travel industry is booming.

My takeaway: the trip has become non-negotiable, but the way we travel has become increasingly fragmented across income levels.

Travel Has Become a Protected Category

The American consumer is hard to read right now. By many measures, households should be pulling back on discretionary spending.

Consumer sentiment has been terrible, employment is growing stagnant, and inflation is still running way above where people are comfortable. The cost of a grocery run, a utility bill, and a night out at a restaurant are all meaningfully higher than they were a few years ago. The squeeze is real.

Despite all that, travel demand continues to not only hold up, but reach new heights!

Global passenger demand rose 5.3% in 2025. International travel was up 7.1%, with load factors hitting a record 83.5%.¹

2026 has kept the streak alive: Delta had 8 of its 10 highest sales days ever in Q1, American had 8 of its 10 highest sales weeks, while United's first 10 weeks of 2026 were its 10 best ever.³ The airlines are capitalizing on a travel boom that spans across all geographies, all fare structures, in both business and leisure.

Lodging data tells a similar story. Airbnb continues to report growth in nights booked and gross booking value. Booking platforms are seeing billions of room nights annually, while hotels, particularly in leisure-heavy segments, continue to show strong resilience.⁴

Major global destinations are dealing with over tourism. Cities across Europe have been setting visitor records. U.S. national parks logged over 323 million recreation visits in 2025, with 26 parks setting all-time records.⁵

Put simply: if the economy is on shaky ground, you wouldn't know it from observing travel behavior.

The more likely explanation is this: Travel and experiences have become a protected spending category, one that households are increasingly unwilling to part with.

How did we get here?

In previous modern economic cycles, travel was historically one of the first line items to be slashed when the belt got tightened. Today, we see the opposite: consumer sentiment is low, inflation is high, yet travel demand is hitting record peaks. It seems to have moved from "first to be cut" to "last to be cut."

Is this all part of a post-pandemic rebound? There was pent-up demand, excess savings, and a desire to make up for lost time. But we're far enough removed from that period for me to confidently say that the story has evolved.

There's something structurally different about how people view travel now. It no longer competes with tangible status items like electronics, apparel, or home upgrades. It has moved into a different mental bucket that feels closer to personal fulfillment and identity validation as opposed to pure consumption.

A recent Empower survey found that one in five Americans say they prioritize travel regardless of what's happening in the economy. Another quarter frame travel not as a cost but as an investment in themselves.⁶

The question has essentially changed. People are no longer asking “should we take the trip”? They're asking, “how do we make the trip work”?

That second question is where the real story lives, because the answer looks completely different depending on where you sit in the household income distribution.

The Top End: Upgrading the Experience

At the higher end of the income spectrum, travel is being upgraded at an unprecedented level.

Delta executives said that households earning more than $100,000 annually accounted for 75% of all airline leisure spending as of 2024. Delta's 2025 full-year results illustrate it even more clearly: premium revenue grew 9% year-over-year, and high-margin revenue streams (premium cabins plus loyalty) now represent 60% of total revenue.⁷ United's numbers tell the same story: premium cabin revenue was up 9% in Q4 2025 and 11% for the full year.⁸

Airlines are physically reconfiguring planes around these figures. United has added 46% more premium seats since 2019.⁹ Delta has introduced nine fare tiers specifically designed to push passengers upward toward premium fare structures. Southwest literally changed its entire business model to cater more to the growing premium market.

Share of seats that are premium, by airline

Source: Cirium

On the hotel side, Hyatt pointed to leisure transient as its strongest customer segment in Q4 2025, with growth concentrated in luxury and upper-upscale properties. Booking Holdings reported $186 billion in gross travel bookings in 2025, up 12%.

Airbnb's Q4 was its strongest growth quarter of the year (revenue up 12%, nights booked up 10%).¹⁰

For the high-income cohort, travel has become increasingly about quality of the experience, not just an activity to partake in. The debate isn’t “can we afford this trip?” It's “which suite, which carrier, and which experience should we buy?”

The Middle: The Trade-Off Class

The most behaviorally interesting group sits in the middle, and they're the hardest to characterize with a single data point because what they're doing is innately adaptive. This group is still traveling, but more cost-consciously, as the middle-class traveler is working harder to afford the same trip they took five years ago.

82% of American travelers now report using active cost-saving strategies: choosing budget-friendly destinations, traveling off-season, opting for cheaper accommodations, cooking their own meals.¹¹

For this income level, the hotel may get downgraded, the restaurant budget cut, or the upgrades aren't purchased, but the trip still happens.

This is precisely why economy cabins remain full even as economy cabin revenue underperforms. Delta's main cabin revenue fell roughly 7% in Q4 2025, while premium revenue grew 9%.¹² The seats are still occupied, they're just taken by people who’ve raised the bar for upgrading their seat and who generate less margin.

The destination itself has also become a factor. Airbnb noted that its expansion markets (smaller, less expensive cities and non-urban destinations) are growing roughly twice as fast as its core markets.¹³ Instead of a trip to Paris, maybe it’s Lisbon. Instead of going to Aspen to ski, maybe it’s McCall, ID.

My point is, even though the price point may be getting compressed, people are still preserving their trips.

The Bottom: Conditional Participation

At the lower end of the income spectrum, travel looks a bit different. Here, participation is more conditional, and the macro backdrop is the explanation.

Lower-income households now spend roughly 59% of their budgets on essential expenses, a meaningfully higher figure than before the pandemic, and 17 percentage points more than higher-income households. When nearly 60 cents of every dollar is already committed to the basics, travel starts to feel genuinely unattainable.¹⁴

Credit card delinquency rates in the lowest-income ZIP codes have climbed from 14.9% in Q3 2022 to 22.8% in early 2025, nearly eight times the national average. Almost 30 million cardholders are currently delinquent on at least one card.¹⁴

Another problem for this group? The price that makes economic sense for the budget traveler doesn't make economic sense for the travel service catering to them.

Spirit Airlines is currently in Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Frontier, after a difficult 2025 in which it posted losses and saw its load factors fall well below 2019 levels, has retreated strategically to leisure-heavy routes in Florida and Las Vegas (coincidentally, these are the locations where price-sensitive demand is still reliably concentrated).¹⁵

The budget airlines are struggling mightily, even turning to premium upgrades themselves! There's just a whole lot less money to be made in the cheap seats in this economy.

Even though the lower end of the household income spectrum is getting squeezed out of airfare, travel isn’t impossible, just conditional. The desire is still firmly there.

Road trips, local experiences, and lower-cost alternatives are being substituted for flights and resort stays. The travel goals are simply being reshaped.

The Bigger Picture

The top is upgrading, the middle is adapting, and the bottom is becoming increasingly selective.
But the desire to protect travel is shared across all income groups.

Is this multi-tier demand sustainable? We shall see. When a spending category consistently survives economic pressure, it often transcends its label as a discretionary expense. Travel, from luxury vacations down to local camping trips, appears to have crossed that line.

The open question is what happens if the upper half of the income distribution segment, currently carrying the most economic weight, begins to feel pressure. If the premium cabin passenger that now represents roughly 50% of Delta’s cabin revenue starts to shake, perhaps due to a white-collar recession or a major drawdown in markets, the industry doesn't exactly have a "Plan B."¹⁶

But if current behavior is any indication, one thing would remain a constant:

We’ll still take the trip.

More Reading:
Six Months, 28 Posts, and a Newborn
Many People Don't Need to Hire a Financial Planner. Here's How to Know If You're the Exception.
Statistically, Your Investments Are Probably Too Conservative
The Windfall Effect: Turning Tax Refunds and Cash Rewards into Savings

Return to Blog

References
¹ IATA, 2025 Full-Year Passenger Market Performance, January 29, 2026.
² IATA, 2025 Full-Year Passenger Market Performance, January 29, 2026.
³ Cranky Flier, The Airlines See Only Sunshine and Rainbows, March 19, 2026.
⁴ Airbnb Q4 2025 Earnings Release; Booking Holdings 2025 Annual Results.
⁵ Reuters, Spain and Barcelona tourism records, 2025; National Park Service, 2025 Visitation Statistics.
⁶ Empower, 2025 Annual Travel Survey.
⁷ Delta Air Lines, December Quarter and Full Year 2025 Financial Results, January 13, 2026.
⁸ United Airlines, Q4 and Full Year 2025 Earnings Release.
⁹ United Airlines investor presentations, 2019–2025.
¹⁰ Hyatt Hotels Q4 2025 Earnings Release; Booking Holdings 2025 Annual Report; Airbnb Q4 2025 Earnings Release.
¹¹ Empower, 2025 Annual Travel Survey.
¹² Delta Air Lines, December Quarter and Full Year 2025 Financial Results, January 13, 2026.
¹³ Airbnb, 2025 Annual Results.
¹⁴ Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Consumer Credit Panel, Q1 2025. (Verify exact source before publishing.)
¹⁵ Cranky Flier, Frontier Goes Back to the Future, February 12, 2026; Spirit Plans to Be a Premium Big-City Allegiant, February 26, 2026.
¹⁶ Delta Air Lines Q4 2025 Earnings Call, January 13, 2026.

]]><![CDATA[Six Months, 28 Posts, and a Newborn]]>Tue, 17 Mar 2026 07:00:00 GMThttps://www.thenewdiligence.com/blog/six-months-28-posts-and-a-newborn

I’m now about six months into launching The New Diligence, and 28 blog posts into my writing journey.

I’ve genuinely enjoyed the process so far, and I’m grateful to everyone who has taken the time to read and engage with my perspective on money, behavior, and the interesting ways the two interact.

Recently, though, this hobby has been set to extra hard mode.

My wife and I welcomed our beautiful daughter six weeks ago. She arrived four weeks early and has been dealing with reflux issues, which means sleep has been… unpredictable.

Many nights I find myself writing at 3:00 a.m., keeping an eye on her so mom can get a few uninterrupted hours of sleep without worrying too much about her daughter’s safety.

It would be easy to put this project on hold for a while. Truthfully, not many people would notice. The blog is still young and the audience is small.

Yet my years of working and conversing with wise retirees has taught me a thing or two about the importance of time. The people who are the happiest in retirement aren’t the ones who waited for life to calm down before pursuing the things they cared about. They’re the ones who found ways to keep those interests alive all along.

Life rarely gets less busy. If something is meaningful to you, you find the time.

Too often we postpone the interests that bring us the most joy. We tell ourselves we’ll pursue them later, whether it be after retirement, when the kids are older, when work slows down, or when life is a little less chaotic.

However, many people eventually arrive at those later years wondering why they waited so long to claim those important parts of themselves in the first place.

So, while my free time has shrunk dramatically, my exercise window has nearly disappeared, and most of my sports hobbies are temporarily on hold… I’ve decided to keep writing.

It’s a small but deliberate choice to keep doing something that matters to me, even as my relationship with free time has deteriorated.

Looking back over the past six months, here are a few of my favorite posts from the blog so far.

If you have a moment, I’d love for you to take a read.

The Subscription Trap: How Consumer Psychology Is Quietly Sabotaging Your Financial Plan
How small recurring charges reshape spending habits more than we realize.

The FIRE Tradeoff: The Risk of Running Out of Life Before You Run Out of Money
Why optimizing life only for early retirement can sometimes miss the bigger picture.

The Psychology of Comparison: How Social Media Rewires Our Money Mindset
Why constant exposure to other people’s lifestyles can distort our financial expectations

Budgeting Sucks. Do It Anyway.

A blunt look at why budgeting works even if nobody enjoys doing it.

Present Bias: Why We Keep Choosing “Now” Over “Later”

The behavioral tendency that makes saving, investing, and long-term planning so difficult.

Statistically, Your Investments Are Probably Too Conservative
Why many investors reduce risk too early and how that can undermine long-term growth.

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