Alone…

We are all alone inside our own heads. Everything outside pulls at our attention and time. We decide what to focus on and for how long. It is invigorating when we are locked in and exhausting when we aren't.

Financial life is not unique in this respect. It requires time, attention, and understanding to identify its risks and opportunities. The statistics say we give it little of any of them so things get missed until it is too late to address them. This is the unfulfilled promise of financial literacy.

The alternatives are to use a tool or rent the time and attention of someone with understanding. But tools are narrow and usually domain specific (e.g., budgeting). In fact, they can increase our workload because we are on the hook for coordinating among them.

If we work with someone, we have to tell them what we want. The further a decision gets from us the more it drifts. The drift compounds, like a game of telephone from elementary school.

So while we may no longer be the actor, we are still the owner of the result.

This is called the principal-agent problem. It exists because we have been unable to carry a decision from its origin to its execution. Meanwhile, no tool or person can persist our circumstances, goals, and all the financial products we use.

We are the unique center of our financial lives. That doesn't change, nor should it. But the volume goes down. The small decisions gets handled. The big decisions are still ours and we never miss them.