Manisha Thakor (@ManishaThakor) is director of wealth strategies for women at Buckingham and The BAM Alliance, a community of independent registered investment advisers.  If you suddenly received $10 million dollars (after-tax) and at the same time a diagnosis that you had only 10 years to live, what would you start doing? What would you stop doing?  These are two questions I love to ask groups when I’m conducting financial-planning and financial-literacy workshops for women. My objective is to help them accurately identify their deepest values and most important life goals, independent of financial constraints and the all-too-common excuse that there’s always tomorrow. I particularly like this pair of questions because they force participants to engage with the twin concepts of limited resources and limited time. This in turn forces longstanding internal conflicts (financial, emotional or otherwise) to bubble right up to the surface.  Over the past decade I’ve asked this question of women across a wide range of demographics – age, income, education, career path, religion, ethnicity, etc. Despite the diversity of participants, the answers are remarkably similar.  Start: Most people tell me they would volunteer, be more philanthropic, travel, spend more time with family and/or pursue hobbies.  Stop: Most people also tell me they would stop working (at least full time). They’d stop worrying about money. They’d stop fretting about what other people think.  While my practice is focused on women, these responses are actually widely held across genders, according to the new Life Reimagined survey from AARP.  This begs two questions. 1) If this is what we want, what’s keeping us from having the lives we truly desire? And 2) What lessons can we learn from these remarkably consistent expressions of human hope and desire?  With regard to the first question, the biggest lesson I have taken away from participants’ responses is that it’s shockingly easy to get unintentionally trapped in a certain lifestyle. And our concept of self is painfully difficult to extract ourselves from.  Let me give you an example, from my own experience. Fresh out of college, I had joined one of the traditional investment banking analyst programs at a top firm. Less than a year into it, I realized it wasn’t the career path for me and decided to switch to asset management. I thought my employer would be furious, having invested heavily in my training and having not yet gotten back much meaningful return on its investment. Instead, a number of very senior professionals pulled me aside. Quietly and almost confessionally, they told me how “wise” I was to get out before I had a family and became accustomed to the heady incomes this career path produced. I would then be unable to ever switch gears.  This memory, nearly 24 years old now, is seared in my brain. The urgency and intensity with which this advice was given to me reinforced how very many men and women were living lives of quiet desperation while wearing incredibly expensive suits and otherwise leading “the high life.”  When I ask people today what’s holding them back, the answers more often than not fall into some version of the same – that is, that the web of life is too thick to trim back or alter now. I’d argue what we can learn from this is that while it may be a common feeling, it is flawed logic to think the status quo can not be adjusted.  Clearly, it’s vital to spend the time and effort discerning what it is you truly want from life.  This brings me to the lessons embedded in the second question, what can we learn from the universality of these collective hopes and dreams? Perhaps it is an awareness that simply understanding that what makes us happy is not the same thing as being able to manifest that happiness. Between the everyday burdens that we are reluctant to put down and the fear of the unknown that keeps us plodding along our initial paths, the steps involved in shifting that status quo are hard to find and even harder to set foot on.  This reckoning is part of the remedy. Once we know about the rift between our present path and the future that we envision, we can begin to take the corrective steps (financial or otherwise) to close that gap.  The stop/start exercise can help us begin to make tighter linkages between our money and our lives so that the former serves the latter, not the reverse. After all, what is the point of working to build a career and financial security if not to enable you to live the life that makes your heart sing? This may seem painfully obvious, yet over and over (and over) I meet people whose financial reality is at odds with their drivers of happiness. For some people, the answer may truly be to make more money or to spend more money. But for a far greater number of people, I find the answer comes in being much more discerning about how to use limited resources – both money and time – to maximize joy in this life.  Read the latest Investing in Funds & ETFs Report.
A thought experiment about relatively unlimited finances in a limited time span can help reset priorities, says WSJ Wealth Management Manisha Thakor.