Personal thoughts by One Financial Services Principal and Co-founder, Jack Morrone
Recently, as summer was coming to an end, I was sitting on the beach, watching two mothers with their young children.
They swam, dug holes, and played in the sand. At one point, I watched one of the mothers fill a bucket with wet sand, turn it over, and lift it away, leaving one of those simple sandcastle towers children have been making forever.
Nothing remarkable happened. It was an ordinary afternoon at the beach.
Today I returned to the same spot.
The families were gone, but two of the little sandcastles remained.
Their edges had begun to deteriorate. Some of the holes had partially filled in. Footprints were disappearing. Eventually, the wind, the tide, or other beachgoers will erase it all.
Someone walking past today might barely notice them. But I do.
Because when I look at those two little piles of sand, I see yesterday.
I see the mothers and the children. I see the buckets being filled and overturned. I see the swimming and digging and playing that surrounded what is now only a remnant.
And it made me wonder how often we look at what remains without knowing what happened around it.
That question feels particularly relevant to me as a financial advisor.
Before meeting with someone for the first time, we usually ask them to gather information: assets, income, expenses, retirement accounts, insurance policies, debts, perhaps a budget.
We need those numbers. They help us understand where someone is financially and begin thinking about where they might go from here.
But sitting on the beach looking at those sandcastles, I found myself thinking about something I would like to do better.
I don’t want to look at the numbers without becoming more curious about the life that happened around them.
A retirement account isn’t simply a balance. Behind it may be 30 or 40 years of getting up and going to work.
A mortgage balance doesn’t tell us about the people who lived in the house.
A smaller investment account may reflect money spent caring for a parent, helping a child, taking a family vacation, starting a business, or responding to something life unexpectedly put in the way.
I’ve spent much of my career looking at financial information and asking what it tells me. What is working? What needs attention? What should change? What opportunities are available?
Those questions matter. Clients should expect their financial advisor to ask them.
But there’s another question I would like to become better at asking:
What happened around these numbers?
Because when someone sits across from me with decades of financial information, I’m not simply looking at the raw material for a financial plan.
I’m looking at evidence of a life being lived.
The numbers record some of it.
They don’t know the whole story.
A few days earlier, I had walked to the bay to watch the sunset. An empty boat sat anchored just offshore.
A woman nearby commented that if she owned a boat like that, she would try to watch every sunset she could from it. I remember agreeing. It seemed like an obvious missed opportunity.
Later, when I told my wife, Leslie, about it, she saw it differently.
Maybe the boat’s owner was doing something else just as beautiful, she suggested. Maybe they were playing with a child, having dinner with someone they loved, or simply somewhere else they wanted or needed to be.
We could see the empty boat.
We couldn’t see what had been chosen instead.
That observation challenged me.
Because perhaps I can make a similar mistake when looking at someone’s finances.
I can calculate what a client gave up by making one financial choice instead of another. I need to be more careful about assuming I understand what they received in exchange.
Financial planning necessarily involves trade-offs. Part of my job is helping clients understand them.
But understanding a trade-off is different from understanding the life surrounding it.
A spreadsheet can calculate what $10,000 might have become if it had remained invested. It cannot calculate the value of what the $10,000 was used for instead.
It can calculate the financial benefit of working another year. It cannot tell someone whether that year is better spent working or somewhere else.
It can tell us what the boat costs.
It cannot tell us where its owner should be when the sun sets.
I’ve become increasingly conscious of that distinction.
The passage of time—and experiences in my own life—have made me more aware of where I use my energy and what receives my attention.
But that awareness hasn’t convinced me that we should try to optimize every moment.
We can’t.
Choosing one thing inevitably means not choosing something else.
Sometimes the owner should be on the boat. Sometimes there is somewhere else they should be.
And sometimes we won’t know until much later whether we would make the same choice again.
Perhaps not every decision needs to be put on trial by our future selves.
A good financial plan should help us understand the consequences of our choices, prepare for risks, and preserve options. But it cannot determine the value of every experience for us.
Maybe its purpose is to give us enough clarity to make thoughtful choices about our resources—and enough freedom to be present for what we choose.
Which brings me back to the two little sandcastles.
Soon they will be gone.
Someone walking this beach tomorrow may never know they existed. Even today, someone could walk past them and see nothing more than two deteriorating piles of sand.
But I see something else.
I saw the buckets being filled.
I saw the children playing.
I know what happened around them.
Perhaps I need to remember that more often when someone places a financial statement in front of me.
My natural instinct as an advisor is to look forward. What can we improve? What needs attention? What possibilities can we create?
I don’t want to stop doing that.
But perhaps looking forward should begin with becoming more curious about what came before.
The numbers matter. My job is to understand them and help determine what they might mean for the future.
But I also want to remember that I’m looking at evidence of a life being lived.
And a life well lived won’t necessarily produce the largest number.
It may include money earned, saved, spent, shared and, yes, sometimes even wasted while people were busy living.
The numbers can tell us something.
But just like those two little piles of sand, sometimes you have to know what happened around them to understand what they mean.
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