Why Most Investors Don’t Measure Returns Correctly

Why Most Investors Don’t Measure Returns Correctly

At the NY Times Bucks: Making the Most of Your Money blog, Carl Richards opines:

There’s an old saying that you should take a look at your checkbook and your calendar to see what you really value as opposed to what you say you value, because the calendar and the checkbook never lie.

Dollars and cents are easy to count in the checkbook. Happiness, on the other hand, isn’t a line item in the ledger. It’s much more difficult to say we’re happier today than yesterday because we coached our children’s sports team instead of staying at the office an extra hour. But what about 10 years from now when our children talk about that great summer when you coached their team? Will we regret that lost hour at the office?

It may help to think of life in units—units of time, units of energy and so on. Each day, you take some of your units and exchange them for units of money. You then take those units of money and spend them on something. But every time you exchange a unit, there’s a tradeoff, and we often fail to look past the immediate return to the potential long-term consequences.