moneyFYI
Financial Freedom Is Merely Organized Common Sense
Conflict Resolution
Much of life is resolving differences between yourself and “the others” For this purpose “others” include family, friends, employees, co-workers, partners, bankers, customers and more. How do we do it?
I recently watched a bright young professor from MIT, Rebecca Saxe, deal with this matter from a neuroscience viewpoint. Essentially, finding out how our brain does what it does. It is quite interesting. The two I watched were at Edge.org and Ted.com
Knowing how it works actually only gives a glimmer of hope as to how we can resolve the differences. Clearly if we start with the idea that the”other” is malevolent, treacherous, knows more, has more power and wishes to take advantage of us, we will have conflict. There are some ways to deal with these inherent conflicts but as Dr. Saxe points out, they don’t always work and there is no reliable way to know when they will work.
There are some things that dispute mediation courses will teach. I have not taken such a course but I am of the opinion that it might be a good sales learning tool. Maybe someone can come up with a shortened version aimed specifically at resolving the inherent conflicts between salesperson and client.
One of my children has taken such a course and I have learned a little from him. I have noticed that he is good at applying the skills. The one thing I remember clearly is that it is not enough to know what the other person’s position in the negotiation may be. You need to know that, but you also need to know how they came to own that position.
- Sometimes it is by default. Everyone in my family is that way.
- Sometimes it is social. All my friends think this is true.
- Sometimes it is emotional. I feel good about this choice.
- Sometimes it is logical. I have studied all the competing ideas and I have decided this one is right.
- Sometimes there is no reason at all. Since you have asked for something they believe they should have, they make up their position on the spot and defend it vigorously thereafter.
When you know how they came to believe what they believe, you can connect your product , service or idea to their position in a way that matches their method of understanding. Sometimes compare and contrast works. The idea is that you must validate their position and the way it was reached and offer an alternative in the same learning style as the one they reached the one that they hold.
For example, a third party piece may help with someone who is part of the in-crowd method. Concepts, facts and figures that are newer may help the logic client. The hard case is the one who makes up their position on the spot. There is no handle to attach to.
The idea is to find a way for them to compromise or find acceptance of a new way. Alternatively they may convince you of their position in which case it is a good day. You have learned something.
The one thing that I know, and there is ample proof of the fact, is that no one has become a Toronto Maple Leaf fan (substitute the team of your choice instead) by using logic.
Go Habs!
Don Shaughnessy is a retired partner in an international accounting firm and is presently with The Protectors Group, a large personal insurance, employee benefits and investment agency in Peterborough Ontario. don.s@protectorsgroup.com
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A Perfect Tax
I suppose that only some have heard of Morton’s Fork. Be aware, a version of it may appear soon.
Archbishop of Canterbury and later Cardinal, John Morton was Chancellor of the Exchequer under King Henry VII. He developed a unique way to determine who should pay taxes. If you had an ostentatious life style, you should pay taxes. If you did not have the lifestyle, you were obviously saving money and so could afford taxes. It seems there were few that did not fit the criteria, and while it may have been unfair, the plan did get the country out of the debt that arose under Richard III.
Modern governments might like that. Do we know, today, of any governments that need to get out of debt? Maybe several.
What they need is a perfect tax. Since income taxes already gather in large amounts from those with the ostentatious lifestyle, we can leave that side alone. But what of the frugal and tax wise. How are we to capture their necessary contributions for the treasury? By a tax on their estates of course.
Why is an estate tax a perfect tax? It meets all of the political requirements of a perfect tax:
- It applies to only a few people. Make the threshold $2,000,000 or so and only a tiny minority will need to pay. Even at $1,000,000 it would eliminate a lot of estates.
- Rich people can afford it, or so the government will say.
- It is imposed while money is moving around. It is like a payroll deduction. You don’t really notice it as much as writing the checks.
- It meets the “social justice” sophistry that all the money people make and keep is dependent on society and this is just a way to pay for that infrastructure.
- The people who owe the tax are dead and therefore without political influence.
- It would raise a lot of money.
How much would it raise?
The income from the Liquor Control Board of Ontario, and the Lottery Corporation together is around $3 billion per year. What would you need to believe to get that much from an estate tax? This is a guess, but if we assume that in Ontario, the Estate Administration Tax (EAT) of 1.50% raises around $150,000,000 now then a tax rate averaging 30% would raise $3,000,000,000. If we believe, as Barry Corbin does that a lot of EAT revenue has been avoided by careful planning, then the rate might be considerably less and still raise the money. If the base is really 3 times bigger as he suspects, then 10% might do. The estate tax base will be much more difficult to avoid than is the EAT base.
No matter how you look at it, and whether the income is $3 billion or even half of that, it is unlikely the government will leave it alone for long.
The current wisdom is that there is $1 trillion to transfer in the next 20 years or so. It is not hard to imagine that governments, both provincial and federal, will want some, maybe a lot of it. I am reliably informed that the federal government has it on their agenda and my imagination is not good enough to expect that the province does not.
No estate tax ever appears without a complementary gift tax.
As well, estate taxes tend to materially reduce estate liquidity and that can cause forced sales of non-liquid assets. Accordingly, forward defensive thinking will be important. If you want to build multi-generational wealth, you will need to be proactive.
Bear in mind that it is never good to panic, but if circumstances force you to panic, then the tactic is panic first.
Don Shaughnessy is a retired partner in an international accounting firm and is presently with The Protectors Group, a large personal insurance, employee benefits and investment agency in Peterborough Ontario. don.s@protectorsgroup.com
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Buying A First Home
For most people, buying a home is the largest single expenditure they will make in their lifetime. As with most financial things, there is a mystique, dare I say spin, about the surrounding information.
Let’s look at some of the details:
- Bi-monthly and weekly payments will pay off your home more quickly. There is no magic here. You pay more each month. Of course, it will make the loan go away sooner. Paying one quarter of the monthly payment each week means you are paying almost 10% extra. There are 52 weeks in a year not 48.
- It does matter if the price of your house goes down. It is likely true that the house you might want to move to will have gone down too. But that may not help you. Suppose you buy a $400,000 house with $100,000 down. It immediately falls in value to $320,000, Down 20%. At the same time the $500,000 house that you really want falls to $400,000. Also a 20% drop. You lost $80,000 but got the new house $100,000 cheaper. Good deal. Wrong! Very wrong!!! When a house falls in price, the loss comes out of your equity. The mortgage does not fall proportionally. When that cheap $500,000 house comes available, you will have only $20,000 of your equity left. All minus closing and selling costs of course. Probably you have enough to tip the mover, you certainly don’t have a down-payment.
- The price of the house is pretty much irrelevant. People don’t buy on price, they buy on what they can afford. What they can afford is a specific maximum monthly mortgage payment and other things like taxes and utilities. If the price of these go up, then the price of the house must come down to compensate. (Make the mortgage smaller)
For example. The buyer of the $400,000 house above expected the monthly payment on the $300,000 mortgage to be about $1,425. If the interest rate on mortgages goes from 3% to 6%, the monthly payment will be about $1,920. But they only want to pay $1,425. That is what they can afford unless wage levels have gone up substantially too. For $1,425 they can have a mortgage of only $222,000. Ergo, (I love ergo) they can pay only $322,000 for the house assuming they have the same $100,000 you had. - The price only matters when you buy or when you sell. I suppose if you refinance, but in general, you want to use the house and the usability is the same regardless of value.
- In the real estate market in Canada now, prices are higher than would be expected normally and interest rates are lower. Do you suppose they are higher because affordability is good just now? Do you think there is any reason to believe that rates will stay low for a long time?
Before you buy, connect up points 2, 3 and 5 and then read Canadian Business. If you don’t want to read the whole article, this is their point.
When buying a home that you might not stay in forever, shop for price. Affordability can be a trap.
Don Shaughnessy is a retired partner in an international accounting firm and is presently with The Protectors Group, a large personal insurance, employee benefits and investment agency in Peterborough Ontario. don.s@protectorsgroup.com
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Digital Intuition
It will soon be 48 years since I first played with a computer. Back then RAM and Hard Drive space cost about $1.00 per byte. About two and half gallons of gas per byte. There was not a gigabyte of RAM in the entire world. In the last 35 years, I have owned more than 20 personal computers. The first of them had 1K of RAM and could do useful work. You would think that I should be digital by now, but it is unnnatural for me.
My grand-daughter made that quite clear to me recently. Last summer, she, her mother, her aunt, my wife and a friend were talking on our deck when a wasp appeared. Someone said there were a lot of wasps this year. The conversation moved to what are wasps for and why are there more this year, what makes them want to hurt you, does anything eat them, and so on.
Kathryn did not join in the conversation. About 60 seconds later though, she knew the answers to most of the questions. Her iPhone had answered them. It never occurred to her to talk about, (negotiate?) facts. They are too easy to get from the internet.
There is a great advantage to be intuitive about information and how it is connected and changing. Young people know that you don’t need to know anything if you know how to find what you need when you want it. Our young people will never know it is hard to acquire the skill. They have known nothing else. We should encourage the skill even though we ourselves may never be able to acquire it. It is supremely valuable.
I must confess that I could easily have gotten caught up in the talk method. While I know facts are readily available, I still make a conscious choice to use my “exo-brain” to find them.
On the plus side of my development, I was trimming our hedge with my grandson as a helper and inadvertently cut off a piece I should not have cut. My first thought was “Undo.” I thought that was hilarious. He didn’t see why.
I doubt I will ever be digital. Maybe because I think a chat room is a coffee shop or a bar.
Don Shaughnessy is a retired partner in an international accounting firm and is presently with The Protectors Group, a large personal insurance, employee benefits and investment agency in Peterborough Ontario. don.s@protectorsgroup.com
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How Much Should Gold Sell For?
J.P. Morgan is reputed to have said, “A thing is worth what it will fetch.” That seems objective. Nonetheless, there are two fundamental premises that underlie the statement. Those premises may alter the statement’s “meaning” for you.
- “What it will fetch” is a synonym for price and it purports to represent worth objectively. Worth/value typically has meaning in terms of usability. On the other hand, price may include emotion, fashion, speculation, urgency and other less measurable factors.
- The statement is only true for the instant in which the transaction occurs. It is not necessarily connected to a continuum because the price is only valid against the conditions present at the time of the transaction. There is no guarantee that they will be present in the future. Price is always situationally dependent.
If you reword Morgan’s statement, you will get this, “A thing is valued at its price.” Most of us would not accept that without adding qualifiers. A better version, “At this time, with these participants, and for this particular transaction, this thing is worth this price.”
Notice from the legal department:
None of what follows is investment advice. It is intended as a basis for introspective thought and discussion with knowledgeable advisers who are familiar with your specific investments, capital formation needs and opportunities, personal needs, risk tolerance, goals and time horizon.
As to the title, I would rather ask what is the value of gold, but I have no idea how to address that. Gold seems to be an asset whose price, as opposed to value in use, depends on fashion, fear, greed, celebrity shills, group think and bubble mentality.
I have trouble with those backgrounds when I am thinking about a concept like value.
My thoughts on gold are:
- Historically gold is a store of value. It is recognized, measurable and nearly indestructible. There are some non-decorative uses, but those are not a large share.
- People have used it as a medium of exchange. They traded what they had for gold and then some other time traded gold for what they wanted. It was a “medium of exchange.” It made trading easier by taking away immediacy. In terms of this use, gold has become a relic. The medium of exchange is now fiat money. More convenient and unfortunately more easily manipulated.
- Some people want to own gold because the fiat money medium has become unpredictable. Governments are making the trade of goods and services harder because no one can be sure what they will be able to buy (trade their money for) using the wealth that they have stored.
- Gold tends to always be worth, proportionally, the same as the goods it trades for and the paper currency price is unimportant. If a cow was worth an ounce of gold one day then it should be worth an ounce of gold some other day. The paper currency price could have doubled or halved and yet the gold exchange rate should be unchanged.
- Some people own gold to hedge inflation. In this case, they don’t know how many pieces of paper money are needed to make a fair trade for an ounce of gold. Good question that. But, gold is an uncorrelated inflation hedge. If you bought it in 1974 for $125 per ounce you would have outperformed inflation by at least double today. If you bought it in 1980 for $800 you have lost a third of your purchasing power. I want my hedges to improve predictability. I can’t get that with gold. For periods ending prior to 2006, it is an inflation hedge that works if you ignore the spike in 1980. After 2006 there are other factors affecting its price. Not many of them are measurable.
- It may have some short-term value as a safe place in case of currency devaluation in the United States, but I doubt it. The old wisdom is “Buy on rumor, sell on news.” That means that things have a tendency to trade up in anticipation of the news (rumor) and trade down once a degree of certainty appears (news.) RIM and the announcement of BB10 in 2013, is a representative example. As to the value of the $US, we are in the rumor phase just now. If the Americans devalued by 50% tomorrow, would the price of gold be higher or lower in 90 days?
Sell on the news, right? Selling makes prices fall. Gold would likely go down once the announcement was made. How likely is a 50% devaluation, anyway? You would need an 80% devaluation to make gold worth more than it sells for now. - In terms of exchange value for other goods, gold is radically overpriced. Gold is almost 30 times its 1972 price. But notice that commodities of all types define the marketplace. For example, gasoline, a premium hamburger, and the price of admission to a movie theater, are each about 13 times as expensive in dollars as they were 40 years ago. Crude oil is about 30 times as expensive versus 1972 and about 9 times versus 1974. Crude is a political tool and some of that shows up in its price.
Base metals are usually a good indicator of price level change. Nickel prices today are around 6 times higher, copper 7 times higher, zinc 4 times, aluminum 4 times. American household income, house prices, and the price of imported food are 5 to 6 times higher. The price of domestic food like eggs, milk, beef, and pork are about 4 times higher. Published price level change is around 6 times. As a “medium of exchange” for the all inclusive world marketplace, gold should be about $390. The rest of the price derives from the other factors. - There are other possibilities I suppose. Maybe gold will become a reserve to back some, as yet absent, currency. When gold is money, as it has been for most of recorded history, its value in exchange is based on price levels in the marketplace. If tomorrow, someone wants to make it worth $5,000 per ounce, then they will make gold irrelevant to the people, because they will have to confiscate all of it to maintain that level. If I were such a powerful person, I would wait for the price to fall before confiscating it. Assuming I intended to pay anyone for it.
- There could be worldwide economic chaos. In that case, all the bets are off. It could have any price, but only for a short time. In the interim, you will have trouble finding anyone to make change.
What could happen to the price?
If we assume
- Price levels are now higher by 6 times (US Inflation) compared to 1972, and
- The $US will some day fall by half from its current value, (price levels then at 12 times)
Gold will likely sell for no more than $750 per ounce once the news appears. BUT. The price could go up before it goes down. Just because the price is crazy does not mean that it cannot become crazier.
When the people stop wanting to own it because the crisis has passed or has been accepted, the price will fall. That is the risk of dealing in things that are priced based on what everyone fears or “knows” to be true. Notice that owning gold is non-economic. It earns nothing and costs to store.
For perspective, you might enjoy a well-respected book published in 1841 by Scottish journalist Charles MacKay. Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. The Kindle edition is $1.00.
Some, the ones who understand market psychology far better than I and who are far braver than I, will make a lot of money over the next few years. Like the people who shorted mortgage backed securities in 2005 through 2007. There are three conditions for success. You must be brave, very disciplined, and very well financed. There will be turbulent times in the interim.
Think it through. The information is there.
Don Shaughnessy is a retired partner in an international accounting firm and is presently with The Protectors Group, a large personal insurance, employee benefits and investment agency in Peterborough Ontario. don.s@protectorsgroup.com
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The Alchemist’s Dilemma II
Despite its attraction, becoming rich by turning lead into gold is a flawed idea. Answer the question “If I succeed, then what?” If something scarce becomes common, its price falls. The price of lead and gold would become nearly identical. Lead might even be worth more.
If your goal is to become rich with alchemy, then if you succeed, you will fail.
Few people today view transmutation of base metals to be worthy of study. Nonetheless, the alchemist’s dilemma still exists. Something that is common cannot have value. Yet some believe that information and knowledge are values. Some promote their superior knowledge. Knowledge can have value as long as not many people know. Knowledge has value only when it is scarce, not necessarily when it is true.
Suppose everyone knew the stock market would go up every Monday. People would have cash on Monday morning and buy. Once everyone knows that, it will stop working. The early adapters will start buying on Friday and selling on Monday. Anything everyone knows is not worth knowing, unless you can take advantage of what everyone “knows.”
In the long run, what everyone knows cannot remain true. People will work the system to neutralize the knowledge.
What people need today is not knowledge or information. What people need today is meaning. As a professional adviser, do you tell people facts or do you tell them what the facts mean in the context of their goals?
Since facts are a given in the marketplace today, meaning will become a marketable advantage.
But, it has a price.
- You will need to know the client’s goals and often they don’t know what they are, should be or could be. Education to do there.
- The client’s time frames are too short, and thus their risk tolerance is much less than they or you thought.
- Be careful of expressing a hard number for expected yield. Once they express their goal of earning 6%, that becomes a fact emotionally. What you will see is not misstated risk tolerance. It is their inability to tolerate disappointment. It can help if you deal, in the short term, with a range of outcome rather than average returns.
- It is difficult to assess what the available information means. Some is easy to dismiss as not relevant to the client, other information is relevant and has multiple possible outcomes. Maybe you should wait for more clarity. A friend of my father’s once told me that you don’t necessarily want to be first. “A pioneer is a guy with an arrow in his belly.”
Best advice. Keep in touch with your clients and ask them to keep in touch with you. Share what you know and explain how it fits with their plan. Together you can travel through the time tunnel to the future.
Don Shaughnessy is a retired partner in an international accounting firm and is presently with The Protectors Group, a large personal insurance, employee benefits and investment agency in Peterborough Ontario. don.s@protectorsgroup.com
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Liveware Fails
A computer systems designer’s view of the world is that the hardware works, the firmware works, and the software works. It is the liveware that causes the problems.
It is not so different when it comes to investing.
We are all, every one of us, our own worst enemy. We have an intellectual time envelope that is too short for our needs. We can recall three or four years of the past with some clarity and can estimate about a year into the future and that with difficulty. The rest is an emotional blur. Doing the investment component of a financial plan requires much longer time frames. Poor fit. Liveware fails.
Beyond the near term, we guess the future. The projections we make are more a representation of our experience, beliefs and biases than they are of any objective reality. If you don’t guess then notice that your advisers do. While they have more experience and more objectivity than you, they still have beliefs and biases. Liveware fails.
The big liveware bias is impatience.
It is closely coupled with end point bias. The current event is the only one that matters and why was I not doing this?
Another problem is fear of loss and its companion fear of missing something good. Probably we should throw in the absence of any clue about random events, too. You will almost always miss outcomes that occur randomly.
If these traits are allowed to propagate, the collection leads to unpleasant outcomes.
When you invest, you are merely moving money from now to the future. When in the future is your decision. Say retirement years. If you are investing for a 30 year long period that starts 20 years from now, how can it make sense to check the progress every day or every month or even every year?
Think about it! Carrots take about 70 days to mature. If you plant carrots in your garden, do you dig them up 3 times a day to see how they are doing? Probably not.
Digging up the carrots 3 times a day is about the same as looking, once a month, at a portfolio with a 20 year time horizon. If you look at the carrots three times a day, the probability of the carrot turning out well at maturity is likely not far from the probability of your portfolio turning out well. Close to zero chance.
What could you learn from digging up the carrot anyway? What if neighboring carrots were not doing the same? Do you even know the standard? Is each 8-hour period identical? What should/would you do if growth fails to meet your expectation? Should you change the plan or recognize that your expectation was likely wrong or things are a bit random?
Similarly, looking at your portfolio each month, what could you possibly expect to see that would be the basis for sound, objective action? There are not 50 people in the world who know, with precision, what is going on in the general market in 30 day periods. You are not one of them and neither is your adviser. Warren Buffet does not know and says so. So should you. Be humble.
What to do?
- If you toss your money into the investment time machine, you need to know to when it is going. You need to know a little of the process it will use to transfer the money in time. Maybe you need a couple of machines using different processes. equities, Bonds, real estate.
- You don’t need to beat everyone else. Comparative wins are of no value.
- You don’t need to know anything about some reporter’s idea of the importance of what happened yesterday or might happen tomorrow. There are no reporters among the 50 people in the know.
- Eventually, you will decide that you need your money so you can participate in the economy in a way that suits your lifestyle when it reappears. Essentially, have enough to live the way you want to or not. If the portfolio meets you needs, it will not matter whether you beat all your friends or came last. All you need is to participate proportionally in the economy along the way.
- You also need to notice that the portfolio is going to be around for another 30 years or so after you retire, so the end point that occurs at retirement is only the beginning of another time stretch. No big deal if the precision is not perfect.
- Invest your time with an adviser who is process driven, who can help you manage your impatience and fear, who can help you learn about the processes involved and help you find appropriate time machines for your money.
- Pay no attention to advisers who are operating in short time frames. You will know them because they are the ones that emphasize their achieved rate of return last month or quarter instead of measuring your progress to your goal. They feed your emotional faults.
Investing is hard, especially so if you emphasize the wrong factors. Emotions are bad. Failing to get paid for everything you invest is bad. Feeding off other people’s emotions is bad. Not recognizing how reality works is bad.
The economic system we know has been around for a long time. Find a way to participate in it and trust that it will work for you.
Don Shaughnessy is a retired partner in an international accounting firm and is presently with The Protectors Group, a large personal insurance, employee benefits and investment agency in Peterborough Ontario. don.s@protectorsgroup.com
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Power and Influence
Recently, Seth Godin pointed out that you don’t own attention or trust or shelf space. You rent it and it has a cancellation clause. As soon as you behave as if you own it, it goes away.
Power and influence are transient too. You need to nurture both if you want to keep them.
A Cree chief once told me that traditionally he, as chief, had unlimited power. Right up to the point where he could order someone to be killed if he wanted to. But, he went on, it is a funny kind of power. It is there if you don’t try to use it and it may not be there if you do try to use it.
“It is like in your world. The pedestrian has the right of way and the man is the head of the house and they are both safe if they don’t try to prove it.”
Long-time relationships with clients are like that. You have the ability to influence people based on your history. You will have influence only as long as you nurture the relationship. Fail and it goes away.
You will continue to have it as long as you don’t try to use it exclusively to your own advantage.
If either happens, you lose your power.
In life, and in business, recognize that you have ownership of only one side of any relationship. You have to earn the other side.
Don Shaughnessy is a retired partner in an international accounting firm and is presently with The Protectors Group, a large personal insurance, employee benefits and investment agency in Peterborough Ontario. don.s@protectorsgroup.com
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Life Insurance Lets You Die Neat
Will Rogers once said that, “Just because a thing is common sense, does not mean it will be common practice.” Not much has changed in the 80 years since.
As an example, the most valuable asset most people have is the ability to earn income. They have other valuable assets too. Their home, their household goods, their jewelry, their car, and their teeth.
How many of these are fully insured against loss or damage?
All but their income.
We can agree that it is common sense to insure the things you value. After 30 years in the business, I can assure you that it is not common practice.
Maybe it is because people don’t know what their income is worth. Here is a handy chart showing the net present value of $1,000 worth of monthly after tax income. It assumes your capital will earn, after tax, 1% more than inflation.
| Per $1,000 Income After Tax / Month | |||
| Years | |||
| To Earn | Capital | ||
| Remaining | Value | ||
| 15 | 188,614 | ||
| 20 | 238,284 | ||
| 25 | 285,542 | ||
| 30 | 330,507 | ||
| 35 | 356,432 | ||
| 40 | 397,956 | ||
For example, a 35 year old retiring at 60 (25 years) and bringing in $5,000 per month now would need capital of $1,427,712 to be financially indifferent to being unable to work.
It is not the insurance answer. The table merely tells you what your job is worth. It tells you nothing about how much insurance you need. Whether it is for disability income insurance or for life insurance, it is not a bad place to start keeping things in perspective.
Your adviser can help you integrate other factors like debt, savings, new expenses like childcare, education savings, inflation and tax effects, government programs like CPP, new expenditures needed like house purchase or expenditure that might go away like clothing, work expenses, and recreation. One-income flexibility is very limited so risks are greater. You need to provide some of the big things.
Your amount of your reasonable insurance need is just a big arithmetic question.
Disability insurance has a capital value you can calculate too. For young people the premium is a tiny percentage of the capital value. If you don’t have the insurance and you don’t have the capital, what exactly are you planning to do if you get sick or hurt?
Both life and disability insurance needs change over time. That fact can influence the kind of insurance you buy but it should not influence the amount you buy now.
Almost everyone is under-insured when you relate the coverage to the value of the asset. Under-insured will not matter if you do not leave a financial footprint when something adverse occurs. Like you have neither debt nor dependents nor a need to spend money. For the other people, the ones with obligations and expectations, rethink the amount.
Everyone has an untidy financial life. You are never finished everything. There are always half-done plans and plans not yet started. If you don’t get the time, you will still need the money.
Insurance lets you be neat.
Don Shaughnessy is a retired partner in an international accounting firm and is presently with The Protectors Group, a large personal insurance, employee benefits and investment agency in Peterborough Ontario. don.s@protectorsgroup.com
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Student 1, Professor 0
Some years ago, a learned university English professor was explaining the meaning of a Margaret Laurence novel to an undergraduate class. One of the students objected to his position and was caustically put down.
The next week, the same student raised her hand and rejoined the argument. “I talked to my mother and she says I am right and you are wrong.”
The contempt from the learned professor was palpable. “And just why would you think that your mother knows more about this novel than I do.” Sarcasm dripping.
The reply of, “My mother is Margaret Laurence.” pretty much ended the discussion.
What can we learn from this? Probably quite a few things but the obvious ones are:
- You never know enough about another person to understand fully how they came to believe what they tell you.
- Everyone knows something you don’t
- Be polite when you are right, and be especially polite when you “think you are right”
- A strongly held opinion is a poor substitute for a simple fact.
- It never hurts to have a route marked out for the retreat
Be a little humble. You can learn more with open ended questions than you can learn by asserting your knowledge and expertise and demanding that followers follow.
Don Shaughnessy is a retired partner in an international accounting firm and is presently with The Protectors Group, a large personal insurance, employee benefits and investment agency in Peterborough Ontario. don.s@protectorsgroup.com
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