John Ortberg is a pastor and clinical psychologist. When he was young, his grandma taught him how to play Monopoly:
She understood that the name of the game is to acquire. She would accumulate everything she could, and, eventually, she became the master of the board. And eventually, every time, she would take my last dollar, and I would quit in utter defeat. And then she would always say the same thing to me. She would look at me, and she would say: “One day, you’ll learn to play the game.”
One summer, John played a lot of Monopoly with the neighbors’ kids, and he — indeed — learned to play the game.
I came to understand the only way to win is to make a total commitment to acquisition. I came to understand that money and possessions — that’s the way you keep score. And by the end of that summer, I was more ruthless than my grandmother.
I was ready to bend the rules if I had to, to win that game. And I sat down with her to play that fall. I took everything she had. I destroyed her financially and psychologically. I watched her give her last dollar and quit in utter defeat.
Of course, grandma being grandma, she had one more lesson up her sleeve:
Then she said: “Now, it all goes back in the box. All those houses and hotels. All the railroads and utility companies. All that property and all that wonderful money. Now, it all goes back in the box.”
I didn’t want it to go back in the box. Now she said: “None of it was really yours. You got all heated up about it for a while, but it was around a long time before you sat down at the board, and it will be here after you’re gone. Players come, players go — but it all goes back in the box. Houses and cars, titles and clothes, filled barns, folded portfolios, even your body.”
At first, John was angry, but eventually, he realized:
Everything I clutch and consume and hoard is going to go back in the box. I’m going to lose it all. There’s not much of an ROI on that.
ROI — return on investment — is something Nick Maggiulli is concerned with all day long. Maggiulli is the COO of a wealth management company, and when he’s not managing money, he writes about it on his blog. In a recent post, he admits having missed his net worth goal of $500,000 by age 30.
Maggiulli quotes The Fast and the Furious. The idea applies not just to street racing, but also to financial goals, and, well, Monopoly:
It doesn’t matter if you win by an inch or a mile. Winning’s winning.
At some point in our lives, most of us get lost in the allure of winning. We become obsessed with money, a career goal, or some other achievement, and we totally forget the world and people around us for months at a time.
While this can happen to anybody, it’s important we snap out of it because, as one reader commented on Maggiulli’s post, “winning” is less about money than we think:
I did not even begin to invest until I was 30. Approaching 70, I will run out of time before I run out of money.
Taken by his reader’s words, Maggiulli reflected on how many people sadly experienced this reality firsthand in the last year. He also discovered a study:
The average retired adult who dies in their 60s leaves behind $296k in net wealth, $313k in their 70s, $315k in their 80s, and $238k in their 90s.
Surprisingly, most people don’t run out of money. They run out of time.
Life really is like Monopoly: You win by acquiring as much as possible, but what good is acquiring if it all goes back in the box?
Investor Anthony Pompliano shares an equally striking analogy: Would you rather be a billionaire in dollars or in time? If each second is worth a dollar, a billion equates to 31 years. Would you give up that much time for wealth? Or switch places with Warren Buffett? Have all the money in the world but no time left to spend it?
Being a time billionaire is worth more than a billion dollars. From Pomp:
The time billionaire can have a time horizon that is counted in decades. The time billionaire can afford to be patient. The time billionaire can slowly compound money over time. There is no rush. There is no compressed timeline that clouds the judgement of a time billionaire. They can recover from almost any mistake. The time billionaire is unshakeable.
Maggiulli reaches the same conclusion. “Balance,” he says. Don’t spend every last dollar, but don’t save for a “Richest Person in the Graveyard” award either.
You probably won’t spend all of your money, but you will spend all of your time.
Whenever he forgets this, he listens to a speech from John Ortberg, Maggiulli says. A speech about Monopoly, that ends with the following words:
You have to ask yourself: When you finally get the ultimate promotion, when you have made the ultimate purchase, when you buy the ultimate home, when you have stored up financial security and climbed the ladder of success to the highest rung you can possibly climb it, and the thrill wears off — and it will wear off — then what?
How far do you have to walk down that road before you see where it leads? Surely you understand: It will never be enough.
So you have to ask yourself the question: What matters?