If I was going to live forever, I would be set.
Financially speaking. I watched too many movies and series to know that being immortal provides more issues than joys. Anyway, the concept should be easy to grasp, within the financial sphere: you save and invest, compounding does its thing, and at a certain point your investments generate an income stream higher than your salary and you are free. However long that initial stage will be, it won’t matter because you have an infinite amount of time in front of you.
Back to reality, we know we have a due date. There are two things we can do:
- accelerate the first phase as much as we can, or better, achieve it at a pace we are comfortable with
- delay our final due date as far as possible
My feeling is that 99% of the content in personal finance is dedicated to the first action, so today I will focus on the second.
Within finance, sometimes the second point is even seen with dread: pension fund managers have nightmares about their liabilities being stretched by pensioners living beyond 100 and savers are worried that they will outlive their savings.
These two objectives are interrelated. Taking care of my health can be expensive, it is an additional cost to budget for that creates a conflict with the other goal: the more I spend today to increase my life expectancy, the higher the risk I will outlive my savings, because I am saving less, or the more I will delay my retirement. The trade-off has to be meaningful, I do not want to push my departure one year ahead if it means that to achieve that I have to work one year more (assuming I hate my job).
The similarities with financial investments
Investing in your health is like any other investment: you put in resources today, money and time, in order to get more time, and maybe even more money, later.
Think about sleeping. When I am well and fully rested, I am more productive and I can translate that additional productivity into more money, like a salary increase because I overperformed my objectives at work.
It is quite crazy to write this because I still remember when, not a long time ago, I was spending all my Thursdays out clubbing and then going to the office having touched the bed for a couple of hours at best. Now, I am pondering about spending almost £1700 on a mattress cover.
I do not think my relationship with health is that much different from anyone else. As much as anyone in their 20s thinks about saving for retirement, at the same age everyone is convinced they are immortal and binging on smoking and drinking and add your thing will never affect them. Maybe in some specific corner of the world you can find a vegan 20-something but normally these obsessions come later in life, when you realize that your clock is ticking, and at a quite high speed indeed. Not sure I am more reluctant than the average person about going to the doctor, would be a nice experiment to run.
“days are long but years are short” does not work for parenting alone. One day you wake up and you do not see or hear like you used to do, your body needs more time to recover and even more time to go back to your personal best. This year is the 23rd anniversary of the Blink182 singing “nobody likes you when you are 23”; my body decided it does not like me anymore at 43. I do not have to ask myself what’s my age again? not because I remember it but because it does not matter, I might have ‘jumped the shark’ and it is all downhill, in terms of peak performance, from here.
I was particularly surprised when I watched the Earthquake comedy special on Netflix, “Health is Wealth”. Comedians offer interesting takes on social topics since before I was born (and they are often more informative than your news channel, let alone those talk shows) but it is the first time that I see a comedian talking about the value of being healthy. Obviously jokes about prostate exams are cheaper than tech stock these days but the special is quite insightful on our relationship with health…just think about the fact that Earthquake was introduced on stage by a fellow comedian smoking. Indoor. In 2022. (probably I should be precise that it happened outside Japan).
I guess we were supposed to talk about investing in your health and investing in general.
They both compound and the day-to-day effect of compounding is pretty stealthy. As for investing, you see very well the downside, the part of your salary going into savings and your body aching during a session at the gym, but the upside would be visible only after months and years. Related to this, it is pretty easy to skip your dues ‘just this time’ for both of them, to find the excuse that would make you sin peacefully only to realize years after that now it is too late to catch up, the disaster is irreversible. No amount of abs in your 50s will cover for the pumps you did not do in your 20s and 30s.
What is way harder in the health space is to track where you are and compare it to where you would be if you took or not some actions. I can set a saving rate, project where my wealth will be in 20 years and then check my actual results against that forecast (provided I use the right benchmark). What amount of red meat do I have to skip in order to meaningfully lower the risk of cancer in my future? This question is way harder to answer.
For a period of my life, I had frequent headaches; once I found the reason and acted on it, I realized I was better only months after I actually got better: no one wakes up to list the problems they are not currently experiencing, especially if you do not keep track of things.
You notice you lowered your personal best running 5k because you kept track of your personal best. No one, after a day spent walking around the city, arrives at home and thinks they should have pain in their legs when they have not. Active traders are encouraged to keep a journal of their trades because their equity line does not offer good feedback on their process: sometimes bad trades generate gains and good trades losses. For even more reasons, we should all keep a health journal…but it is such a boring activity that no one bothers doing until they really need it and by then it would be too late anyway.
Trackers
Peter Drucker famously said, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” Imagine planning for your retirement without knowing what are your current costs. To monitor my monthly expenses, I had to go through my bank and credit card statements and sort out each item line by line. Now my bank-app does part of this by itself. In a similar way, different companies started to sell health trackers in the recent past. I was quite skeptical at first because I thought the set of data they could collect was quite poor and limited, but I am increasingly convinced about their usefulness. Or maybe I am just getting old.
Take the example of EightSleep again. The sensors on the mattress cover measure your body temperature in order to improve your sleep. But what if the same device could collect a set of data to predict if you have early signs of flu or, in conjunction with other sensors, even…cancer? Ok, maybe the last example will go down in history as another Theranos-esque prediction, but it is not outside the realm of reality founding a way of using a set of data to infer something that, at first, does not seem related to it.
Imagine a (hopefully not so distant) future where you go to your doctor and start the conversation by presenting your data instead of you describing to him/her how you felt in the recent past. Is £288/year a waste of money for a Whoop? Maybe. Or maybe the right answer depends on your age. I am more and more inclined to look at this with the same lenses that I used for crypto: given the technology we have today, maybe not collecting any data is riskier than doing it, relatively to its cost.
I never really cared how many steps I was doing in a day, but now that my phone tracks it, I check it. I am not yet at the point where I walk around the living room in the evening because I did not do enough steps that day, but I definitely try to make sense of why a particular month was an outlier compared to the average. And I walk whenever I can just to improve my numbers. Just for me.
Prevention is better than cure
The health community is pretty sold on this principle and you should too. Prevention is also less expensive if you consider it as insurance on catastrophic events.
But unlike in the financial world, where saving X, and investing in Y, produces the same result for anyone, each of us needs a particular solution for our own issues. Luckily, tech is providing better solutions to tackle this fact. Take Levels, a company that provides real-time feedback on how diet and lifestyle choices impact your metabolic health by leveraging biosensors like continuous glucose monitors (CGM). While smoking cigarettes is probably equally dangerous for all of us (do not ask Jim Simons about this though), different bodies react to food in different ways. You might follow a diet thinking that is going to help you while actually putting yourself behind.
Does intermitted fasting work? What about the vegan diet? There are so many moving targets that any external, seamless help from a tracker starts to feel worth the money. Or they are all just the 2022 version of those lotions that promise to grow back your hair? It has been a year since I take Athletic Greens and I have no clue if it did anything to me. We have a lot of solutions, for long-term risks, and few ways to measure their efficacy. A bit like a value investor with a fuzzier back-test to sustain their investment thesis.
Given the risks and the opportunities, I think some investments are worth trying. Today, the market offers multiple ways to track (some of) your data, the harder part is to find a reliable source to read and act on them. Something like Fount. Packy McCormick wrote about them and, surprise surprise, the future looks not boring. The problem is that today Fount has a price tag that put it out of budget for 99.99% of humanity. My health insurance offers me a health assessment every two years; this year, since I already had it last year, I paid for it out of my pocket. This way, I can have twice the data they run on me and twice the consultation on every question I have based on the data I collect. Sure, it was relatively expensive and it meant some budget cuts but I felt it was worth it.
With this post, I wanted to reflect on actions that have a certain cost today with an uncertain payoff in the future, like…investing. By now it should be obvious to you that regular exercising is better than not, processed food is bad and mental health (no stress) is as important as physical health. Well ok, maybe mental health is not that acquired, I also have in my notes a post about depression so…will keep it for the future but if you can, start to pay attention to it today 😉 [per gli italiani la’ fuori, c’e’ una meravigliosa intervista di Mr Rip ad Alessandro De Concini dove si parla di ‘andare dallo psicologo’]
Antifrugality?
I feel that concepts like everyone is better at being their own financial planner and that paying for financial advice is not worth the price, the constant focus on frugality, the distrust towards professionals that do not have your best interest at heart, might give a false sense of confidence in our capability of making optimal choices. I am definitely guilty of this and here I am trying to first convince myself that a different approach is possible.
Antifragility!
I have mixed feelings about Mr. Taleb but once I considered him as one of my gurus. Is it reasonable to take lifestyle advice from a former trader or am I again fooling myself? Taleb thinks that our body, like any other ‘system’, should be stress-tested in order to become antifragile. Instead of overprotecting ourselves, like having regular meals every day, we should go through controlled stress periods, like fasting. Similarly, our training should be a mix of high-intensity cardio and high heavy lifting, the more extreme the better. Repeating the same routine at the gym is better than watching Netflix but is not as great as pushing your body in every possible direction.
Based on nothing other than my common sense, this theory resonates with me. That said, I probably wasted 20 good years following my gut instead of professional advice, hiding behind the excuse that expert advice would be wasted money, while all I was fearing was finding someone that would put me in an uncomfortable position.
I have asthma, you can figure out how much I loved running. Five years ago, they removed a mole on my shoulder that was a melanoma. The great thing about shoulders is that you use them in basically every movement…but I could not stay put. So while I was waiting to get the green light to go back to the gym, I started to run. What at first was just a few km became 10 and then 15. It is still something that after a while, an hour and a half max, bores me to death but now it is firmly part of my weekly routine.
I did not live fast…so there is probably no point in dying (relatively???) young. And I am pretty determined to kick some of my daughter’s future dates’ asses in 15 years. I think it is time to invest in myself.
What I am reading now:
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