What We’re Thinking

Park Piedmont clients are entrepreneurs and homemakers, world-renowned physicians and award-winning authors and directors, the founders of startups and the owners of closely-held businesses, and young professionals and retirees.

The common thread is that they are thoughtful, intelligent people doing good and interesting things with their lives.

Today we’re kicking off a new series to help our clients get to know other clients in our extended community – others who look to Park Piedmont for financial guidance that’s principled, personal, and practical.

We begin with Peter Brill and Wendy Lewis, who have been traveling the world together since January 2022 – by sailboat. We caught up with them as they prepared to pass through the Panama Canal and asked them to share a bit about their adventure around the world – and to reflect a bit on life with money.

The interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Whose idea was it to travel the world by sailboat? Did either of you need convincing?

Wendy Lewis: We first went sailing together off the coast of Hawaii, and I was overwhelmed with joy because it was so much fun. And then later we were out on a charter in the British Virgin Islands, and I turned to Peter and said, “Have you ever thought about sailing around the world?” And he said, “Don’t mess with me because I have. It’s a dream.” And I said, “Really? Let’s do it.”

Peter Brill: Yeah, we shared it from the beginning. And the timing was right. Our children were adults and in a good place, and both sets of parents had passed away so we were no longer caring for them. And things were opening up after Covid. So we made the decision pretty quickly, but we’ve remained flexible in terms of making travel plans. There are different constraints to consider for traveling by boat versus over land – like hurricane or cyclone seasons, winds, and currents. And when you’re traveling the world, you’re also thinking about changing political climates, safety and security, and of course budgeting. Park Piedmont’s “How Long Might Your Money Last?” illustration has been helpful in that regard.

What is one purchase you’ve made that felt especially weighty – or filled with possibility?

Wendy: Buying the boat! We knew we wanted this particular boat because it’s set up for sailing in the way that we wanted to sail. It’s safe and it’s sturdy, but it moves fast and it’s fun to sail. So that purchase felt like a leap!

Peter: Yeah, we sold everything. The house, the cars – the boat is our home now. We purged a lifetime’s worth of stuff. We don’t have any possessions except for some artwork, books, and photographs – some personal stuff like that, but no furniture or anything. If we have it, it’s in the boat with us. And we’re just going to do this until we decide otherwise – I guess if it stops being fun, or if there’s a health issue, or if something else comes up that shifts our thinking.

Wendy: We’re thinking 5-7 years, or maybe 7-10.

Peter: And we’ve been aboard for over two already!

Have you discovered any tips for saving during your travels?

Peter: Yeah, here’s a big one: if you don’t purchase health insurance coverage for the US, you save an enormous amount of money. Colombia is an example of an advanced, modern, cosmopolitan country with good, affordable healthcare. There’s actually something called dental and medical tourism – people who fly from the US to Colombia to get first-rate, affordable healthcare. So we’ve saved a lot of money by paying out-of-pocket for minor expenses and by purchasing insurance based in London for major medical expenses we incur anywhere in the world – even in the US, though not for longer than a month.

What’s the last thing you purchased that brought you joy?

Wendy: We love artwork, and we recently purchased a little wooden sailboat that someone made in the Guna Yala part of Panama, an indigenous area. They make the sails out of anything – just sheets sometimes. And there are these beautiful traditional textiles that the Guna Yala make, called molas. They’re entirely hand stitched, and many of the women wear these on their clothing – like with a collared blouse. They’re so beautiful. So we bought one of those too. Both purchases have brought us joy.

What do you wish you could tell your 20-year-old self about life with money?

Wendy: It’s okay to follow your heart, and money will follow. I really bet that you’ll work it out. Another thing is that it’s okay to splurge every once in a while. You do need to save, but – my dad was a great caregiver and took care of our family financially. But one day after he retired he said, “You know, I think it’s finally time to start spending this money that I’ve saved.” And that really struck me. He and my mom had dreamed of going to Europe and to places where he had served in the war. And then unexpectedly, he was sick. He’d always been super healthy, but he passed away in six months. So they didn’t get to go on that trip. I was just barely 30 when he passed away, and it really stayed with me. So in a way, that was also a lesson to that younger self: save but also enjoy, because all you have is what is immediately in front of you, you know? So much about money is about saving for the future. That’s important – I don’t want to discount that – but all we have is right now.

Peter: I would say, “Tranquilo.” Don’t worry so much about money. I think I spent too much time worrying and feeling anxious about it. There’s so much energy consumed in worrying, and it isn’t helpful. So I would tell myself to spend that energy on something else.

What is one decision you’ve made, or step you’ve taken, that has made your life with money less stressful?

Peter: Before we left, we needed to organize our finances and streamline everything. Turning everything over to Park Piedmont pursuant to our values and our desires has been great. We don’t fuss over it, it’s not something that requires a lot of energy or bandwidth on our end, and that’s the choice we like.

Wendy: The thought and care that the Park Piedmont team puts into their work has been great for us – it’s something we don’t have to worry about when we’re traveling, so that’s huge.

What’s the best gift you’ve ever received or given?

Wendy: Time – the gift of spending time together. And also unconditional acceptance from someone. Money can of course help with things like spending time together – like giving us the ability to bring our kids here, or for us to go back and visit them. But if we’re talking about something specifically related to money, the best gift I’ve ever received was when I was traveling in Africa with my brother. He paid for us to trek and visit gorillas in Rwanda. We loved it so much, we went a second time and were lucky enough to see a newborn baby gorilla. The whole band was celebrating its birth. It was amazing.

Peter: I think the best gifts are experiences – being with loved ones, with family and friends.

During your travels, have you noticed differences in “life with money” (approaches, mindsets, etc.) in other parts of the world – that perhaps have even changed your own?

Wendy: Traveling has allowed us to meet so many creative, resourceful, entrepreneurial, and funny people – and to experience value systems that are different than we typically see in the US. For example, we’ve experienced overwhelming generosity from people who may live very differently economically. They’re so eager to help us – sometimes it’s related to money, sometimes it’s related to time, and sometimes it’s related to understanding the language. It has changed me in ways that will impact how I interact with people when we go back to the States.

Peter: Yes, and if someone helps us out with something, our reaction is to ask, “How can we pay you?” And they’re like, “Pay us? You don’t need to pay us!” In many ways, resources allow us to do amazing things like travel. But money makes life more complex – it doesn’t guarantee happiness, fulfillment, or peace.

April 15, Tax Day: the culmination of our annual season of data-gathering, number-crunching, and spiritual reflection.

What’s that? You don’t use tax season as an opportunity for self-examination and renewal?

OK, fine – me neither.

Tax Season is a time-intensive, laborious grind, and you’re no doubt in good company if you offer a grunt of thanksgiving when it mercifully wraps up.

In many ways, taxes fall outside our sacred considerations.

And yet — our religious and spiritual traditions (they’re sometimes also called our “wisdom traditions”) locate in taxation a chance to reflect on the delicate, often precarious balance between ethical individual action, just leadership, and the redistribution of resources to meet ever-present social needs. For example:

• Jesus and the Gospel narratives are intentional in discussing taxation, spotlighting individual values like integrity and generosity along with big-picture aims like an economically just society.
• The primary form of wealth distribution mandated in Islam – indeed, one of the five pillars of the faith – is Zakat. Zakat isn’t synonymous with tax – but for Muslims meeting a baseline level of wealth, it’s obligatory and serves the same end of social welfare. Beyond that, it’s viewed as a kind of worship – a way to purify wealth by providing for those in need.
• The same goes in the Hebrew Bible and Talmud. Public services, priestly work, sanctuary construction, care for the poor: all were funded by broadly assessed taxes.

Of course, there is room for healthy, constructive debate about how much taxation is appropriate. Regardless of one’s opinion on that topic, our wisdom traditions generally agree that the process of preparing and paying taxes offers individuals a platform for ethical conduct. We can direct attention to the needs of the neediest in our midst, while supporting a stable and just social order. Indeed, given the very human temptations we all confront in the tax prep process – think coveting and cheating, to start – tax season may in fact be one of our most potent spiritual proving grounds.

Here’s something curious.

This week The Wall Street Journal published the results of a survey it conducted with several thousand swing state voters. The paper asked about political preferences, naturally, but its questions extended into the survey respondents’ views of the economy.

According to the Journal, about three-quarters of respondents said inflation had moved in the wrong direction over the last year. This assessment was widely held across all seven states – and is in direct conflict with hard economic data.

As the Journal’s Greg Ip writes, “In the 12 months through February, inflation, according to the century-old consumer price index, was 3.2%, compared with 6% a year earlier. Use a slightly different time horizon, or a slightly different measure (such as the index the Federal Reserve prefers) and you get similar results. Take out food and energy – or for that matter look only at food and energy – and inflation is still down… Yet the average person thinks it went up.”

A similar finding cropped up around recent market returns. More Journal survey respondents believed their investments or retirement savings had declined during the previous year – even though 2023 was “a period in which the stock market roared to record highs, home values held steady or rose, and interest on savings went up.”

What’s going on here? Ip sees an ongoing battle between vibes and facts – with vibes apparently pummeling facts.

One way to begin to understand this better lies in the insights of the field of behavioral economics. The research of the Nobel-winning psychologist Dr. Daniel Kahneman, who died last week at 90, poked fatal holes in long-standing economic assumptions about the rationality of human decision-making. Kahneman found that the brain makes quick decisions using incomplete information, often leading to unfortunate outcomes.

As his Bloomberg obituary reported, Kahneman told the American Psychological Association in 2012: “People are designed to tell the best story possible… We don’t spend much time saying, ‘Well, there is much we don’t know.’ We make do with what we do know.” (In a future Life with Money essay, we will delve deeper into the work and influence of Dr. Kahneman and the wider field of behavioral economics.)

Other factors, also part of the behavioral economics landscape, are plausible, too.

Emotional Influences: Our emotions can powerfully shape our perceptions and decision-making. When someone experiences “vibes” – whether positive or negative – about a given something or someone, these emotions can override rational analysis or factual evidence.

Cognitive Biases: Cognitive biases affect us all, in particular the ways we digest information. Confirmation bias, for example, pushes us to gather information that supports our pre-existing ideas or feelings, while discounting evidence that runs to the contrary.

Going With Your Gut: Intuitive thinking works quickly and automatically, based on unconscious processes and memory. We often go with our gut, our intuition, even amid a lack of concrete evidence.

Complexity and Uncertainty: When navigating uncertainty, vibes offer a way through. Instead of sifting through messy, often conflicting facts, we occasionally go with a simpler, quicker decision-making process.

Group Identity: Humans tend to align ourselves with groups, identities, or brands that share certain values or stories. When a particular vibe resonates powerfully within one’s social cohort, the feelings can be reinforced, even though they conflict with objective facts.

For all of us, in ways both observable and unconscious, our behavior is shaped by a constant, complex interplay between our thoughts, feelings, preferences, and incentives, not to mention broader social dynamics. But being attentive to these emotional and cognitive influences – whether they’re related to personal finances, the broader economy, or other areas of life – can help us think more critically and engage more intelligently when encountering both facts and vibes.

To say that the Park Piedmont team is a group of animal lovers would be an understatement.

Tom, Nate, George, and Heather are all dog owners, while Sam, Leslie and I are owned by our cats. Catching a glimpse of someone’s pet while on a Zoom meeting is frequently a highlight of our workday.

We also love it when we get to chat with our clients about their pets, and any fun stories or pet photos we receive are usually circulated for the whole team to enjoy.

Earlier this year, Tom wrote a “Life with Money” piece that explored the ways we invest in our relationships, and how those investments can offer the highest and most-predictable return on investment. So when a recent Pew survey found that almost half of U.S. pet owners consider their pets to be as much a part of the family as their human counterparts, we couldn’t help but get curious about how this expanded relationship might impact pet owners’ financial behavior.

According to a recent article from Forbes, 66% of U.S. households own at least one pet, compared to just 56% in 1988. Annual spending on our furry friends has increased too, with $136.8 billion spent on pets in 2022 – up from $123.6 billion in 2021.

More than 23 million American households adopted a pet during the pandemic, according to an article by the Washington Post, so the increase in pet ownership and spending isn’t surprising. What we wanted to know is, how did the increased spending on pets affect peoples’ spending in other areas?

I often joke that I spend more per month on food for my two cats, Luna and Vin Diesel, than I do on food for myself, and George recently remarked that he eats generic cereal so that his dog, Penny, can eat like royalty. Do pet owners find themselves cutting back in other areas so that their animal counterparts can live the high life?

That same Washington Post article interviewed several dog owners across the country, who remarked that they’ve gone to such lengths as having fewer date nights and cooking at home more, or even delaying purchasing their first home, due to the amount they spend on their pups. Budgeting for veterinary care, both routine and emergency, also factored into their spending decisions.

Two recent surveys from pet care site Rover.com found that the majority of pet owners consider their pets a top financial priority, even at the expense of their own necessities. According to the surveys:

• 81% of pet owners said inflation is impacting their food bills and 41% of dog owners have cut back on their own groceries as a result.
• 37% of pet owners said there’s no amount of money they would accept if it meant they could never have a pet again, and at least a quarter said it would take $1 million or more for them to give up their pets.
• 44% of pet owners would take a lower-paying job if they could bring their pets to work with them.

This commitment to pets is also reflected in the roughly $35.9 billion in annual spending going towards vet care, as well as pet insurance to help manage the cost of pet ownership. With the average monthly pet insurance premium being $53/month for dogs and $32/month for cats, the coverage can be appealing, albeit expensive, as a means to help manage vet bills.

Employers are catching wind of the trend too, with some 5,000 companies now offering pet insurance in an effort to attract talent and acknowledge the strong bond between people and pets.

Another interesting trend among pet owners is the rise in pet-friendly home modifications. Architects and interior designers alike agreed in a recent New York Times article that when designing or renovating a home, you may need to consider the needs of both human and animal occupants.

So what features are pet parents considering adding to their homes? According to the article, for dog owners, spaces like special dog showers or custom crates that blend seamlessly into the décor are top of mind. For cat owners, architectural playgrounds (think wall-mounted jungle gym) and hidden litter boxes are ideal.

We don’t only spend money on our pets, though. We also devote intangible resources to them, like time, energy, and love. Reverend Tish Harrison Warren writes about this in a recent newsletter, where she describes her recent experience with hesitation around adopting a dog for her family.

“In an unspoken place inside me, I’d created a zero-sum system where any money, time or energy I gave to a domestic animal was taking away money, time or energy from other humans,” Warren explained in her newsletter. Warren isn’t the only one who felt that tension. In 2022, Pope Francis criticized couples who chose to have pets instead of children.

Warren goes on to explain that her family’s new pooch, Herbie, forced the family to slow down their lives, be gentler, and lean into love. She ends the newsletter by pulling inspiration from a poem written by Herbie’s namesake, George Herbert – a 17^th– century Anglican priest and poet – “Love, without diminishing, always welcomes more.”

We love our pets here at Park Piedmont, and given the opportunity, we’d love to hear about yours, too.

What’s the best investment you’ve ever made?

Reflexively, some might point to a particular stock in their portfolio – maybe they took a flier on Berkshire Hathaway a few decades ago or bought Amazon when it was primarily an online book seller.

Some lucky few might shine their light on something more tangible: a garage sale masterpiece or a rookie baseball card of a long-ago hero; for others, maybe it’s a highly appreciated piece of real estate.

For Park Piedmont clients, and those philosophically aligned with our approach to investing, maybe you’d look not to an individual stock, but instead to a low-cost, broadly diversified, indexed investment – like Vanguard’s Total Stock Market Index Fund ETF (symbol: VTI). We can just picture it now: it’s been invested in over the years, with a disciplined focus on the long-term, avoiding any inclination at market-timing or attempts to outsmart the market.

OK, well done.

But what if, in considering our “best investments,” we widen the lens?

A book I recently read makes the point that doing so may benefit our life’s bottom line.

The Good Life, by Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz, distills the research findings of the Harvard Study of Adult Development (the “Study”), a remarkable research project that began in 1938 – and is still going strong. The study was initially designed to try and figure out what makes people healthy, and – more than that – what makes people thrive.

Over eighty-plus years, the Study has tracked several hundred of the same individuals, and many of their offspring, recording the granular details of each subject’s life experience: memories of when they were little kids; their first loves; raising a family; work life; leaving the workforce; aging; health ups-and-downs; and the end-of-life – not to mention routine blood work and other medical tests.

Here’s an excerpt from the book’s first chapter:

“Through all the years of studying these lives, one crucial factor stands out for the consistency and power of its ties to physical health, mental health, and longevity. Contrary to what people might think, it’s not career achievement, or exercise, or a healthy diet. Don’t get us wrong: these things matter (a lot). But one thing continuously demonstrates its broad and enduring importance:

Good relationships.

In fact, good relationships are significant enough that if we had to take all eighty-[plus] years of the Harvard Study and boil it down to a single principle for living, one life investment that is supported by similar findings across a wide variety of other studies, it would be this:

Good relationships keep us healthier and happier. Period.” (10)

At some level, this just sounds intuitively right. And yet, the authors note, it can be hard – very hard – to put this knowledge into practice in our everyday lives. They cite two main reasons: first, while “the good life may be a central concern for most people… it is not the central concern of most modern societies… The modern world prioritizes many things ahead of the lived experience of human beings.” (30)

Second, at a more elemental, biological level, our brains, as extraordinarily sophisticated as they are, “often mislead us in our quest for lasting pleasure and satisfaction.” (30) It turns out, we humans are just not consistently good decision-makers at knowing what’s best for us. As a result, we tend to prioritize what’s measurable – wealth accumulation, status, achievement, to name a few – when those markers, while no doubt important, are not as lastingly important as we, or the broader culture, might assume.

This is an important point that Dr. Waldinger, the co-author, makes in an accompanying lecture. In balancing work, money, and relationships, the emphasis should be “both-and,” not “either-or.” Having sufficient financial resources is crucial for helping people feel, and be, secure. As Dr. Waldinger reports, the trouble arises when people place too much weight on work, wealth accumulation, and social status, leaving too little time and energy for the relationships in their lives.

So, let’s return to our opening question: when we think about our best investments – and what gives us the best bang for our “whole-life” buck – what if we turn the spotlight onto our relationships? As The Good Life informs us, after eight decades of scientific research, it’s time spent on our relationships – with family, friends, community members – that offers among the highest, most predictable returns on investment.

Rarely but inevitably, a single event will flip the world upside down – the kind of improbable, unexpected thing that occurs on a day just like any other, but then alters life as we know it.

Sometimes that thing is devastating, such as a freak accident or the sudden death of a loved one. Sometimes it’s delightful – a newfound opportunity, a chance encounter, or a lucky break.

I first learned about Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s “black swan theory” in February 2020. Little did I know that a black swan event was about to alter my world – and everyone else’s as well.

I was reading a review of Taleb’s The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, written by our late cofounder Victor Levinson in 2007. Taleb defines a black swan as an event with the following attributes:

“First, it is an outlier … because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility. Second, it carries an extreme impact. Third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable.”

Vic explained the metaphor: “The Black Swan references the idea that there was a time in the past when only white swans appeared, to the point where people thought only white swans existed. It took the appearance of one black swan to change that ‘certainty.’”

Had I known the pandemic was just around the corner, I would have predicted that the markets would tank. And they did – for about a month.

And yet, as we noted at the end of 2020, “the stock market recovered surprisingly (in many cases, stunningly) well after bottoming out in late March … The Vanguard U.S. Stock Index Fund, which represents all the public traded companies in the U.S., rose 21%. The stock indices are at or near all-time highs.”

It turns out, the markets are so unpredictable that even knowing ahead of time about a black swan event does not guarantee how markets will react to it.

To quote ourselves again in late 2020:

“As compiled by Bloomberg and reported by Jeff Sommer, ‘[In late 2019] the median consensus on Wall Street was that the S&P 500 would rise 2.7 percent in the 2020 calendar year.’ That, of course, turned out to be dramatically low.

“A few months later, in April 2020, as the coronavirus stopped the global economy in its tracks, forecasters hit reset and issued another set of predictions. Per Sommer:

“‘They said the market would fall 11 percent. But the market had begun climbing on March 23, the day the Fed intervened to stem panic. The strategists failed to register the change in direction. If you had invested, based on their predictions, you would have missed a great bull market.’”

Jason Zweig of The Wall Street Journal had a similar conclusion:

“To me, the lesson of 2020 isn’t that a giant, unpredictable ‘black swan’ can wreak havoc with the best forecasts. Instead, the lesson is that whatever seems most obvious is least likely to happen.”

Zweig continues: “The only incontrovertible evidence that the past offers about the financial markets is that they will surprise us in the future. The corollary to this historical law is that the future will most brutally surprise those who are the most certain they understand it.”

“Uncertainty is the only certainty there is,” according to mathematician John Allen Paulos. “Knowing how to live with insecurity is the only security.”

We agree, at least about the certainty of it. As Vic wrote in response to the wildly unpredictable markets in Spring 2020: “Since no one can predict the future, uncertainty must be considered…”

We all experience life-altering black swans, whether personal or widely shared. So how, then, might we “live with insecurity,” at least from an investment perspective?

Our recommendation is the same now as it was in 2020:

“Review your portfolio to ensure that your asset allocation remains consistent with your goals, risk tolerance, and time horizon. If they’re aligned, stay the course. If they’re not – or if you fear they may not be – we can help you make thoughtful, deliberate modifications.”

In short, an appropriate asset allocation can and should offer you peace of mind – even in the event of a black swan.

We had no idea what the 2023 year-end market update would look like a year ago.

As it turns out, the year ended with US stocks up 26 percent, as measured by the US Total Stock Market index fund. The total bond market was up 6.8 percent. Inflation cooled in late 2023 to a 3.4 percent annual inflation rate – the Fed’s goal being a “slow and steady” two percent.

We didn’t see that coming – but fortunately, we didn’t try to.

Many others did though. “All across Wall Street … the mood was glum. It was the end of 2022 and everyone, it seemed, was game-planning for the recession they were convinced was coming.”

If you remember, the US Total Stock Market index fund was down 19.5% at the end of 2022. By and large, investors were indeed feeling pessimistic. Those who created new “game plans” based on feelings or guesses, however, may be regretting it.

According to “Everything Wall Street Got Wrong in 2023,” a recent article from Bloomberg News, the consensus view on Wall Street a year ago was to “sell US stocks, buy Treasuries, [and] buy Chinese stocks.” The consensus, however, was “dead wrong.”

At the end of 2023, stocks were up, the 10-year treasury yield was the same as it was a year ago, and Chinese stocks were down.

“’I’ve never seen the consensus as wrong as it was in 2023,’ said the chief investment strategist at Russell Investments,” the Bloomberg article reports.

One strategist from TD Securities admitted that “he and his colleagues ‘did some soul searching’ as the year wound down … ‘It’s important to learn from what you got wrong.’”

The reporter somewhat dryly notes: “What did he learn? That the economy is far stronger and far better positioned to cope with higher interest rates than he had thought. And yet, he remains convinced that a recession looms. It will hit in 2024, he says, and when it does, bonds will rally.”

The point here is not to gloat that investment strategists got it all wrong. After all: we didn’t see 2023 coming either.

The point is that nobody could have predicted how the markets would shake out in 2023 – and if they did, it was simply a lucky guess. And who’s to say that their next guess will be equally lucky in 2024?

With an appropriate asset allocation, there’s no need to make lucky guesses or new game plans based on market performance – regardless of whether you think a recession looms. Instead, a diversified, personalized portfolio is designed around your particular risk tolerance, time horizons, and goals.

But importantly: if any of those have changed, please don’t hesitate to reach out to your advisor for guidance. We’re here and always happy to fine-tune your portfolio.

Recently, I asked other Park Piedmont team members whether they had resolutions for 2024. Since our last new year’s article on intentions for life and money, I’ve been curious about the various ways people ring in each new year, and why – despite our differences – so many of us decide that January 1 is the perfect day to plan how we hope to live out the year.

In 2013, behavioral scientists Katy Milkman, Hengchen Dai, and Jason Riis analyzed the frequency with which Americans searched the term “diet” on Google over the span of eight and a half years. They found that “diet” searches soared on January 1 – by about 80% more than the typical day. “Diet” searches also spiked at the start of calendar cycles (i.e., the start of a new month or week) and after national holidays.

Essentially, New Year’s Day is known as a “temporal landmark.” Just as landmarks help orient us on a map, temporal landmarks indicate where we are along the timeline of life (especially when it feels monotonous). Most people recognize the social landmarks we share: holidays, the start of the year, the first day of Spring. We also have personal ones that are unique: anniversaries, new jobs, birthdays.

Whether social or personal, temporal landmarks can serve as transition points as we move from one chapter or season of life to the next. Turning to a crisp, blank calendar page can make us feel refreshed and excited about future possibilities. Behavioral scientists refer to this as the “fresh start effect,” where the perception of a clean slate can increase a person’s likelihood to pursue ambitious goals with increased motivation and vigor.

A fresh start might prompt us to start and maintain new routines. The researchers mentioned above also examined attendance at a university gym over the course of a year. They found that gym visits increased at the start of each new week, month, and year, but also at the start of a new semester or right after a student’s birthday (with the glaring exception of turning 21, which decreased attendance).

Why does the perception of a fresh start work? For one, they offer an opportunity to disassociate the “old you” from the “new you.” The old me spent a fortune on takeout, but starting Monday the new me is focused on saving for a new car. By avoiding dwelling on past failures and optimistically focusing on future successes, a fresh start gives us the confidence to “behave better than we have in the past and strive with enhanced fervor to achieve our aspirations.”

A temporal landmark can also help us to see the forest through the trees. By distinguishing a specific moment in time, such as the job anniversary or the start of a season, we’re able to separate it from the day-to-day minutiae and reflect on long-term goals. Daniel Pink writes in his book When, “Temporal landmarks slow our thinking, allowing us to deliberate at a higher level and make better decisions.”

In our work, it’s also a reason life transitions and milestones can nudge people to review their financial lives and goals. As a matter of fact, studies have found that framing savings against an upcoming birthday can prompt individuals to reflect on getting older and encourage higher retirement savings rates.

It’s worth noting that, while fresh starts can nudge us to start on a goal, we also require tools and strategies to stay committed as our enthusiasm wanes (case in point: New Year’s resolutions). One way to do this is by using dates with personal significance as opportunities throughout the year to check-in and recommit to previously set goals. Even the anticipation of a big life milestone (like turning 30, 40, or 50) can help sustain motivation. As Pink explains, this is one reason why the most common age of first-time marathoners is twenty-nine.

As it turns out, the Park Piedmont team leans lukewarm on the idea of New Year’s resolutions, but we’re looking forward to plenty of landmarks in 2024: growing families, weddings, “firsts” in a new city, other new year celebrations, bucket-list vacations. Money, of course, will factor into all these milestones.

Whatever meaningful moments and fresh starts lie ahead for you (and whenever they may be), we’re excited to hear more and are grateful to be a part of some of them.

Happy new year!