The Trade-Off Framework Every High Earner Needs | Ep. 2
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Episode Summary
Most financial planning conversations focus on goals. But goals without priorities are just competing wishes.
In this episode of Beyond the First Million, Gideon Drucker and Jordan Haines discuss the real trade-offs that shape financial lives for high earners.
From housing decisions and private school to retirement timing and lifestyle design, they explore how major financial decisions inevitably compete with one another, even for people earning substantial incomes.
They also discuss why many professionals spend too much time optimizing small expenses while overlooking the handful of larger decisions that truly determine long-term outcomes.
Topics Covered:
Why Every Financial Decision Is a Trade-Off [00:00]
The “Side-by-Side” Framework for Decision-Making [08:20]
The $10 Decisions vs the $10,000 Decisions [11:59]
Housing Decisions and Lifestyle Priorities [17:24]
Why High Earners Still Feel Financially Constrained [23:13]
Gideon's Personal Trade-Off Philosophy [28:17]
Resources & Links
Transcript
Below is the full transcript for Episode 2 of Beyond the First Million.
Why Every Financial Decision Is a Trade-Off [00:00]
Gideon: Welcome back to Beyond the First Million by Drucker Wealth. I'm Gideon Drucker, and the much taller gentleman to my right here is Jordan Haines.
Jordan: I'm slouching...
Gideon: To make me feel better, it does help.
Last episode, we spoke about why we're doing this podcast, who we're doing it for, and how we think through financial decisions. There'll be a lot more of that. Today, we're going to be speaking about priorities, financial priorities, and goals.
Before we do that, I realized I didn't really mention on the first episode why the name is Beyond the First Million. I think it's catchy, and after all, we are now in the content game, so having a catchy title is probably helpful. But the real reason is that our clients, and everybody we're speaking to, are thinking beyond the day to day. They're not worried about exactly what is happening this week in their budget or finances. They're thinking, Am I on the right track long-term? They're thinking about the trade-offs inherent in long-term decision-making.
Quite frankly, one million dollars of assets isn't what it used to be. I'm definitely going to get called out for saying that. Somebody's going to find this clip and say something about it. But it's who we work with. It's who we help. Their decision-making is different. When you're on the path of building wealth, you're accumulating, you're already climbing that mountain, and that's who we speak to every day. That's who this podcast is built for.
Something that bonded us at the start is that we both nerd out on financial planning. Between the two of us, we've listened to every financial podcast out there.
Jordan: This is the only one.
Gideon: It is just Drucker Wealth.
Gideon: But something that has always bothered us, or at least something we flag in our own planning process, is that advisors talk too much about goals. What they really mean is priorities.
So I'll set the stage because it's the very first thing we do with clients when we start talking about their goals and priorities. We begin building a financial plan and ask them: Tell us everything you want to achieve. Anything that's on your mind. I always emphasize, literally anything. Don't worry about whether you can do it. Don't worry about whether it's realistic.
We once had clients who were both W-2 employees working in tech, and they wanted to open a wine bar. It took me asking four times before they finally admitted it because they were almost embarrassed to share it. I told them, "That's fine. Let us be the bad guy. Let us tell you whether it's feasible. Let us figure out what would need to change." The first step is simply brain-dumping everything. Maybe there are 15 things you want to achieve. Maybe we can just take over. Why is that not enough? Where do we go from there?
Jordan: Before I talk about why that's not enough, I think it's important to recognize that everybody is a little different.
When I do any sort of planning with my wife, she filters. I don't. I'm thinking about everything I want to do, things I dream about, even things that will probably never happen. I like starting from that place because I begin to notice patterns. I start noticing the things I keep coming back to. With clients, it's the same thing. It's helpful to say, "Tell me about everything." Then we can ask more questions and start narrowing things down.
But it's not enough because, frankly, we don't know what's going to happen over the next 30 years. We don't know what's going to happen over the next 10 years, five years, or even one year.
When I was 19, I was convinced I was going to franchise a hot dog stand and do that for the rest of my life. That definitely did not happen.
Gideon: I've never even seen you eat hot dogs.
Jordan: I love hot dogs.
Gideon: Interesting...
Jordan: That's another podcast.
Gideon: Hot dogs and black licorice. He has black licorice off-camera. I've never seen anybody eat that. It made me suspect about this entire podcast project.
Jordan: Let's start another show, and we'll call it Hot Dogs and Licorice.
Gideon: How about we focus on one podcast.
Jordan: One podcast... I don't own a hot dog stand, and I probably never will, and it's not important anymore. Even when we look 10,15, 20 years out, we start to project certainty on people's future, which I don't think anyone understands.
Yes, start with goals, but then we want to focus on what are the things that we can control right now with importance right now? I don't know if it's necessarily the goals is the focus, and you'll get into this later, it's more what's most important right now, that we focus on anything. That's where priorities come in.
Goals vs Priorities [05:18]
Gideon: And I think priorities helps bring it back to the present. Your whole point is it's about the now. We also need to understand how much you want these things.
If you have a list of 10 things you want to achieve: buy a home, buy a vacation home, fund your kids' private high school and university education, make sure there's money for future weddings, go from a two-income household to one income, travel internationally when the kids reach a certain age, or have your spouse take a 12-month sabbatical... that's great.
Everything only matters in relation to everything else. We'll literally start doing this during the planning process. We say, "Okay, I think we understand everything you're talking about. What is the non-negotiable?" What is the thing that, if necessary, we could get rid of everything else for, but we're still doing this one thing? We've had clients tell us they wanted a vacation home because they grew up spending summers in one place where the entire family gathered. Grandparents, cousins, everyone. It was the central location for the family and made it easy to stay connected. Now they have young kids of their own, and within the next five years, they want to create that same experience. That became their North Star and to make it happen, they need to make a little bit more income.
We'll talk about it later, because that sounds outrageous, saying just make more money. It's really great financial advice, but knowing how to identify these different goals and turn them into priorities is key.
I'm a huge believer in writing down your goals. In fact, it's probably the number one thing I'd tell somebody to do before anything else. Write down the five things you want to achieve financially. But then ask yourself what you actually want to do.
Because I think we both know, even if you're making this kind of money, $500,000, $700,000. Most of our clients cannot do everything that's on their list exactly the way they managed it.
They're going to be tweaks, and part of our job is helping them separate the non-negotiables from the nice-to-haves to the I thought about this three minutes ago before the meeting. I mentioned it because if you don't dive deeper, advisors will think the thing they've been thinking about for the last 10 years and the thing that they just brought up from the moment of three minutes ago are equally important... and they're not.
You only discover that by having the conversation. We're talking a lot about: does a plan work? Are we on track with the plan work? What we mean by that? What is the success rate? That's a whole separate discussion, but I think those conversations are useful, especially for younger people, as long as that's not the only way you're thinking about money.
When you think about planning, success rates, and what somebody is able to achieve. It's all about when we make the changes.
The “Side-by-Side” Framework for Decision-Making [08:20]
Jordan: When I think about planning for the future, planning is just managing trade-offs. It's really what it is. We can't have everything we ever wanted, and I don't think that's news to anyone. Just understanding that if I do something, what effect is that gonna have on other things. That's gonna be the area that I find most helpful for clients, where they start to think about the future and sometimes get overwhelmed because they think there's 10 things that they want to do, and they like all of them, and some of them, maybe they have an inkling towards what's the most important. When we sit down and show them, "If you do this, here's what it might mean for these other goals," we're not saying that's exactly what's going to happen. We're saying this is what the direction is like...
Gideon: Your providing context.
Jordan: Exactly, you're providing context. If you just understand the trade-offs, I find human beings, the clients that we work with, are really good at making the decisions once they understand the trade-offs. Then we have to bring it back to present reality. If you do this thing right now, what's that going to mean in the future? So when we look to the future, yes, one of the goals is understanding the trade-offs, but we also want to understand what are the small things I can do right now that help get me there. That's really what planning for priorities and goals looks like.
Gideon: It's asking, what small changes can we make now so we don't have to make huge changes later on? That's really what financial planning is. Sometimes when we're showing clients success rates, I tell them, "You're not going to run out of money." The plan might show a 90% success rate, which technically means there's a 10% chance you run out of money, but nobody is actually going to do that.
Jordan: We don't fail, we adapt.
Gideon: We don't fail, we adapt. Nobody's runs off the cliff and keeps going at the same speed, 5 feet away from the cliff realizing they were running a mile out.
I tell clients that none of our clients are ever going to run out of money. It's not because we're so wonderful, it's just human nature. At a certain point, if you were heading in the wrong direction, unfortunately, our retirement division works with clients in their 60s and 70s, and sometimes they meet later in life, where they don't have as much optionality. But even then, instead of running off the cliff, what do they do? They downsize. They cut back. They move to a different state, which maybe they don't want to live in, but that makes life a little bit easier.
That is our worst-case scenario. We want to make sure our clients do not have to change their behavior radically in their 60s and 70s in ways that are just going to totally disrupt their lives if they could have made those subtle, small tweaks that you mentioned.
Jordan: Really famous book, you've probably read it, Atomic Habits. James Clear talks about I don't remember, I'm probably getting the words wrong, but he talks about outcome goals and process goals.
Where outcome goals are very much in the future. And what's interesting, you probably had this before too, but I've had many clients come, and we'll be talking, and we'll be thinking about the future. Usually, within the first conversation, clients say, "I want to have $5 million, then I'm good." My first question is always, "Where did that number come from? Why that number?" That's an outcome-oriented goal. It's focused on getting somewhere in the future, and there's so much that has to happen between now and then.
The process-oriented goal is different. It's saying, "I want to be saving enough right now to feel like I'm making progress." What's interesting is that most clients don't actually obsess over the final number. They want to feel like they're making progress. The question then becomes, progress toward what? We need to know where we're going directionally, but we also need to identify the small process-oriented things we're going to do along the way. Those little actions help move you toward the area you want to go. And ten years down the road, you may decide you want something completely different. You may decide to make a left turn and head in an entirely different direction.
The $10 Decisions vs the $10,000 Decisions [11:59]
Gideon: Actually, you made me think of a client story. They were building out their goals, and they were a married couple who temporarily had to live in two different locations because of somebody's job. They put in the plan that they wanted a house in Boston, they already had an apartment in Hoboken, and they wanted to buy a vacation home in the country.
I didn't comment because I think we both know sometimes it's better to just let it happen. We hadn't even gotten through the plan yet. They were simply looking at everything on their client portal, and they stopped and said, "That seems like a lot, right? That just seems like a lot of maintenance, a lot of stuff to keep up with. Do we really want to own places in three separate locations?"
I said, "Hey, we can run some scenarios. We can show you what it looks like." But for them, those had probably been goals for years. They had just never seen them laid out in such a clear way. Suddenly, it became, "Okay, we'd have to spend money to own this, we already own this, then we'd have to buy that, we'd have three properties to maintain, and there are only two of us. We can only be in two of the three places at any given point." It just kind of fell down of its own accord.
Diving into the Drucker Wealth process, you can also extrapolate this to just how you should be handling or thinking about your own goals. But I love when we share a plan and say, "Here's what it looks like. Here are scenarios one through four based on everything you've shared with us." We really don't know how people are going to react. We try to set the stage by saying, "It's not perfect. We're probably going to make some tweaks. But you should feel good about where you stand."
I always want to lower anxiety when it comes to money and planning. If somebody is in good shape, I want them to know that early in the meeting. I want them to hear, "We're going to talk about tactics and changes, but take a breath. We're not about to tell you that you need to change your entire life." Sometimes we do have those conversations, but when we don't, I like people to know that.
Sometimes we'll run through scenarios and I already have an expectation in my head. Maybe I think they're going to need to save a little more, spend a little less, and retire a little later than they originally planned. I assume they're going to be disappointed. And this just happened two weeks ago. I thought that was going to be the tone of the conversation. Then I shared their scenarios and everything we had built out, and all they saw was, "Wow, we can buy the home in Rhode Island and be closer to family."
Jordan: Thats great. That's all we wanted.
Gideon: That was literally the number one thing.
And every and this really ties back to the beginning, as they gave us eight goals, but that was their North Star. If we can make this happen, and we have a second home that we're closer to our elderly parents, and the kids can spend time with their grandparents. We can cut back on dinner during the week, not a big deal. We can work an extra year. I had planned a retirement at the age of 60 in the plan, just because. Why the heck not? But all of those other things became secondary.
You never really know how people are going to react. Giving them space to think, modify, and adjust is incredibly important. When they told us that, I immediately thought, "Great. Then we can get rid of these other three goals for now because they don't move the ball forward."
Focus on the short term instead of the long term. That we're not even there yet. People surprise you. They think about their own lives differently than we expect. And part of the beauty of this process is that this usually happens around the fifth meeting. They may have thought one way during meeting one, but a lot changes in between.
Think about what happens after a married couple leaves a meeting with us. They close the laptop and start talking to each other. They're talking about everything we just talked about without us listening in. By the next meeting, priorities have often shifted because they've had time to process everything together.
That's really why we focus so much on priorities and goals. And we spoke about this a little bit last time, but it's pertinent to this conversation. Everybody wants to fix what's easiest. We'll pull up somebody's portal and show them they're spending $12,000 a month. And then right next to that is a goal, or a target, of $60,000 a year for the next seven years for private school. Then you want to buy a $3 million home, which will run you $180,000 a year. And you want to buy vacation home four years after that, which will just add another $100,000 of just total expenses. Then they'll look at all of that and say, "We think we can get our monthly spending from $12,000 down to $11,000." And I say, "Okay, that's great."
But when you're looking at it side by side, cutting $1,000 a month isn't really moving the needle if you're about to add $300,000 a year in real estate expenses. I'm not making fun of anyone when they say that. It's actually a very natural reaction because it's easier to change the small thing. It's easier to skip a dinner out or spend less on Amazon. Whereas, the goal, the house, the real estate, the private school. Those are the big decisions. Those are the things that actually drive the plan. That's the $10,000 decision versus a $10 decision. But it's a tough thing to navigate when people want to focus on a $10 decision, when you know it's a $10,000 decision that we really need.
Jordan: Sometimes that comes up all the time. I would say half the time when we're talking to clients, it's actually a whole lot easier than they thought it was going to be. It's interesting because it always feels like people fall on one end of the spectrum or the other.
In some situations, clients think they're way worse off than they actually are. They come to us thinking, "I have to drastically cut back. I'm never going to be able to do the things I want to do." Then, on the other side, you have situations like the one you described, where they're focusing on the wrong thing. It's not the tiny adjustment that's going to make the difference. They may need to adjust their expectations around the bigger decisions they're making.
Housing Decisions and Lifestyle Priorities [17:24]
Gideon: And there's a psychology component to that. We naturally want to change the things that don't feel disruptive to our lives. If you've always assumed your kids are going to private school, that decision has already been made in your mind.
What can we cut back? Maybe it's dinners out. Maybe it's Amazon spending. Maybe it's some other discretionary expense because those things don't feel tied to their identity or the future they've already pictured for themselves.
By the way, this is not a pitch against private schools. I'm just using it as an example because it's something that comes up often with clients. We actually want to do a full episode on it because there are a lot of layers to that conversation.
Sometimes we're talking to people who live in areas with great public schools. They're already paying significant property taxes, and then we're discussing private school on top of that. At some point, you have to step back and ask, "What's actually most important here? Why is private school the priority? Is it the right priority?" Those are the types of conversations we find ourselves having all the time.
Housing Decisions and Lifestyle Priorities [18:44]
I live in New York City right now, but in a few weeks I'll be moving to Westchester. We're buying a home in Chappaqua, which is also where my sister lives. Property taxes there are really high. There's a part of me that feels like I should get my CFP designation revoked because, on paper, it's probably not the most financially efficient decision I could make.
The reality is that my sister lives there. My wife and I want to be close to family. We want our future kids to grow up around family. That's what matters most to us. So when I look at my own financial plan, those property taxes are a non-negotiable. I know they're high. I know they're going to make my dad's head spin. He still doesn't understand why anyone would choose to live somewhere other than exactly where he lived in New Jersey. But for me, that's the trade-off I'm willing to make. It's only been in the last six months, as we've seriously started planning this move, that I've realized how strongly I feel about it. If I were sitting across from a financial planner, I'd say, "I understand the property taxes are high. Don't spend time trying to convince me otherwise. I'm living there. We'll make the rest of the plan work around that decision."
Jordan: That reminds me of our own house. We moved four years ago, and honestly, it was probably the best non-financial decision I've ever made. Objectively, a lot of people would probably look at it and say it wasn't the smartest financial move. But it wasn't detrimental to our future. We were still able to maintain the habits and behaviors we needed to stay on track financially. At the same time, it was one of the best personal decisions we've ever made. We don't regret it at all. We'll be there for a long time. We love where we live.
I think that's important because when we talk to people, we have the benefit of having these conversations every day. A lot of people have no idea what they want or what's most important to them. There are two questions that I've found incredibly helpful. The first is a question I definitely didn't create, and unfortunately, I can't remember who originally came up with it. But if we were sitting down for coffee three years from now, and you felt really good about the progress you've made in your life, what would have had to happen for you to feel that way? That question helps people orient themselves differently. It takes the money out of the conversation for a minute.
Sometimes people will say, "Well, I'd like to have a couple of million dollars." That's fine if that's genuinely what's important. But most of the time, the answer is something completely different. It's, "We're living closer to family." Or, "Our kids have a backyard to play in." Or, "We're spending more time together." It tends to be non-financial. But once people identify that thing, it becomes much easier to make trade-offs because they can finally say, "This is the direction we're trying to go."
Gideon: We even do that with clients. I like asking at the start of an engagement, "Hey, if it's three months from now, we wrap this up, and you loved it. Everything worked the way you wanted. We solved the issues that were important to you. What would have had to happen for you to walk away feeling fantastic?" And by "walk away," I mean continue working with us for another 30 years. What would have had to happen? We're focusing a lot on the value side of money, peace of mind, and even getting your time back. That's been the theme of the first few episodes, and I think it's underappreciated and not talked about enough. That's part of the reason we're emphasizing it so much.
But sometimes clients simply say, "I'm really confused about my 401(k). It would make me feel better if I understood how I'm invested, knew I wasn't throwing money away, and felt confident that I have the right allocation." That's a great answer. Everything doesn't have to be as high-level as we're talking about here. Sometimes it's, "I've never wanted to deal with an insurance agent, but at the same time I know I need to make sure my family is protected if something happens to me." Sometimes it really is the small tactical things. Allowing people to share those concerns and say, "These are the three or four things that have been bothering me," is incredibly valuable. For us, that might be a 20-minute conversation, but for them, that becomes the North Star. That becomes the thing we're working toward.
Jordan: I think that's the principle, and then we can move on to the next topic because I think there are some practical things we can tell people.
The principle here is: yes, plan for the future. Think about your future. But if it starts to feel hard or ambiguous, shorten your timeline a little bit. Three years is a lot more tangible than 30 years, and three months is more tangible than three years.
Three months is helpful because it's right in front of you. It's, "I need to get this solved so I can move on." Three years is helpful because it's, "This is really important to me. I want to do it." It might not be the first thing I need to work on, but it's something that's directionally important. Thirty years is more like, "What do I want to say on my deathbed?" That's a different kind of question altogether.
Gideon: You're a young, healthy guy. Let's say 60 years.
Jordan: Yeah, let's say 60 years. I don't even know where that puts me at. We don't need to think about that; that's going to turn us into an existential podcast.
Gideon: Or a math prodcast.
Jordan: So, going back to behaviors and process-oriented things, you've worked with hundreds of people. What do you find are generally the main priorities people have?
Why High Earners Still Feel Financially Constrained [23:13]
Gideon: So the first one is really toning income up and down. That sounds a little strange, but another way to say it is: When can I retire? People don't usually phrase it that way. We talked about this a little bit last time. They come to us and say, "Hey, I'm 41. I've been grinding. I make $700,000 a year. I travel. I have all this stuff. How long do I have to keep making this kind of money to maintain my lifestyle when I'm no longer making this kind of money?"
Sometimes they'll say, "Based on my experience and what I do, I'm probably never going to make less than $200,000. But how long do I need to make $700,000? At what point can I make $200,000? And when can I retire?" Or they'll say, "I want to start my own thing. I want to get out of corporate life. How many years should I keep working and building reserves so I can have two years of potentially no income?"
I think that's probably the number one question. And with married couples, it comes up even more. We had clients just last week where we delivered the plan. They have three young kids, and the mom is currently staying home. One of the questions they wanted to explore was, "What happens if she goes back to work? How much income would she need to make, and would that move the plan forward in a meaningful way?" She asked, "Alright, if I make $50,000, how does that impact the plan?"
I like showing people what it looks like when they're playing offense versus defense, meaning making more money versus spending less. So we ran the numbers side by side. This family already makes around $600,000 a year, just for perspective. We showed them what it would look like if she earned $50,000 to $75,000, versus what it would look like if they simply cut back their spending by about $1,500 to $2,000 a month. No judgment. No recommendation. Just the numbers side by side.
And her reaction was immediate. She looked at it and said, "Well, I'm not going back to work. We're just going to cut back." That wasn't necessarily something they had said upfront. It wasn't part of the family plan they had articulated. But she didn't want to go back to work if it wasn't necessary. Showing them another path to the same outcome was incredibly valuable. Cutting back by $1,500 a month produced essentially the same after-tax result as going back to work and earning that additional income. And honestly, that became the meeting.
We talked about a lot of other things, but the whole meeting boiled down to that one realization. It wasn't even just the financial side of it. It was the emotional side. She no longer felt like she needed to feel guilty about not working or that she wasn't contributing enough economically. Obviously, she was contributing in a tremendous number of ways already. Being able to solve that problem from another direction was incredibly helpful.
Career. Income. Family. Those are the types of conversations that come up all the time. As our clients have gotten a little older, maybe people in their 40s instead of their 30s, people making a little more money and having a little more flexibility, the decisions become less about the basics and more about things like real estate, buying a primary home, buying a vacation home, travel, education funding, and how they want to spend their time.
We work with a lot of families, so travel comes up constantly. Sometimes, investment, which we will talk about as we have a lot of thoughts about using property as an investment. And education funding, the balance between saving for your kids and saving towards your retirement. Not just what accounts to use, but how much they actually want to cover. How do you balance saving for your kids with saving for retirement? If your kids are four and five years old, how much should you be planning for today? How do you think about the risk and reward of education planning? That's probably an entire podcast episode on its own.
Those tend to be the big categories. Then the smaller things usually come out of those larger conversations. For example, when people talk about travel, I would say a lot of our clients talk about a base amount they want to travel each year and then maybe every other year. They want to do a big international trip, so maybe their travel budget is $15,000 annually, and then every other year it's $30,000. I think I mentioned this on the last podcast, that we want to do, you know, we want to put in a pool for the kids or...
We just had this one client whose entire plan got disrupted in the best possible way. His daughter is an incredible gymnast, and she reached a level where they suddenly found themselves traveling every single weekend. There were competitions, coaches, tournaments, and a lot of expenses that simply weren't part of the original plan. But when we came back to the beginning of the conversation, it became very clear that this was their non-negotiable.
As a family, they told me and love hearing this. They told me, "We want our daughter to go as far as she wants to go. Money is not going to be the reason she doesn't become a Division I gymnast or even make the Olympics. We're going to give her every opportunity, she has to work her ass off to make that happen." Now, they said that they were not gonna spend this money if she's not going to commit. This wasn't just throwing money at a hobby. But supporting her became the priority.
Quite frankly, it blew up the original plan because nobody expected things to move this quickly in her gymnastics career. But once it became the non-negotiable, everything else adjusted around it. And they weren't stressed about it; they were super excited. They were saying, "This is what matters to us. We'll get her through gymnastics. We'll get her through college. We'll make the rest work." What's fascinating is that this wasn't even part of the plan two years earlier. It never came up. But now it has become the thing everything else revolves around.
Gideon's Personal Trade-Off Philosophy [28:17]
Jordan: You keep using this phrase, non-negotiable, what's your non-negotiable...
I think that's been the theme throughout this entire conversation. What's the thing that matters most? If I summarize what you've talked about, the big priorities that tend to come up are career, how we work, education, travel, and home. Those are usually the major categories people are trying to figure out. If I were to summarize it even further, I think it really comes down to two things: how people spend their time and how their kids spend their time. And, connected to that, where they spend their time. That's really how I think about all of these priorities.
Work is about how you spend your time now and in the future through your career. Education is about how your kids spend their time. Travel, being at home, real estate, and lifestyle decisions are all really about where you're spending your time and who you're spending it with.
That's why understanding your non-negotiables is so important. Once you know what those are, you can start saying, "Okay, these are the things I'm going to focus on." Then you can go through the exercise of understanding the trade-offs. If I do this thing, what does it affect over here? If I prioritize this, what am I giving up somewhere else?
I think that's something we'll probably talk about in future episodes because the present-day trade-offs are where people tend to struggle. These are all goals. These are all objectives. They're the things we want to accomplish. But the actual actions required to get there? I think people tend to overthink those. Most people already have a pretty good sense of what's important to them. The challenge is identifying it clearly enough that every decision can be measured against it.
Gideon: Usually, if we put everybody listening on the spot... which would actually be kind of fun. We should figure out a way to do that. Just call somebody out and say, "Hey Bob, we're calling you out." But if we did that, I'm sure everybody listening already has that one thing, or maybe those one or two things, in the back of their mind. They have that thing where, if they're being honest with themselves, it's probably the reason they're even listening to a financial planning podcast in the first place. As great as Jordan and Gideon are, the reason we're listening is that we want to achieve this one thing, and everything we do is going to be in service of that.
So maybe we will leave you with that, so you can think about that all weekend. Thanks for joining us today. Next week, we'll be talking about financial advisor nonsense. The buzzwords and things that advisers say that bother us and probably don't help you in figuring out what you need to do next. Stay tuned.
