07/21/2026
The best meetings you have are the ones where you don't even touch your slide deck.
I sat down with somebody for about an hour and 15 minutes recently and had a full-blown conversation with them about where they are and ultimately where they want to be headed from a money perspective. He's doing very well at a pretty young age, a couple of years older than me. He's a high earner, with multiple forms of equity compensation, two kids, and a handful of lofty goals that he wants to hit:
• Fully funding both kids' college educations
• Being able to become entirely work optional within 12 years
• Continuing to be able to afford more expensive vacations and experiences, like taking his kids to Disney World every year
And we talked through a whole bunch of different things to see about getting him there:
• Making sure his emergency fund was up to par and fully funded
• Building up specific investment accounts for him to draw from in those early years of work optionality
• Talking about pre-tax vs Roth vs after-tax 401k contributions and which ones make more sense now and at different points in the future
• How to continue using a small inherited account to kickstart his kids' college education funding
• How to think about his vesting RSUs and whether he should diversify or not, and building a framework for how to use those to hit his work optionality goal
Not at a single point in that conversation did we talk about how the market has done this year, what interest rates are going to do, or what's going on geopolitically in the world right now. Nothing about GDP growth or corporate earnings or any of that stuff.
Just him, his goals, and building the framework to hit those goals on a blank excel spreadsheet.
He said it was one of the best meetings he's ever sat in on.
