The Ecclesiastes Investor V- Eternity Money

I’ve written about timely money in the technical sense often. If you are unsure about the technical side of this entirely, you need to talk to a qualified expert such as myself or another Fiduciary financial planner. And by that I mean, if you have no idea how much you’ll need to have or will have for retirement, you should work on that!

On the more philosophical side, I’ve also written about this, albeit at less length. The most important thing to say about what we’l call Timely money is to enjoy it. 

Thus I realized that the only worthwhile thing there is for them is to enjoy themselves and do what is good in their lifetime; also, that whenever a man does eat and drink and get enjoyment out of all his wealth, it is a gift of G-d. – Ecclesiastes 3:12

Of course the goal of the financial planning process is to quantify how much this needs to be. It’s what I spend most of my life doing. At this point, I have done hundreds of financial planning processes involving retirement saving and spending, and the most important insight I can offer on this topic is something I think Koheles would agree with: if you think of every dollar you spend from the beginning of retirement until the end of your life as money that your kids, your grandkids, your church or mosque or synagogue, etc., does not get to spend, you are setting yourself up for a lot of guilt and a much less satisfying experience of your retired years. If you already know what you intend to spend and what you don’t intend to spend (you might need to at some point as a matter of course), you will have a much better experience of retirement. This is just as true for the Accumulation phase (saving up) as the Spending phase (being retired).

Ecclesiastes gives us one of the more sardonic perspectives on this late in the text:

Even if a man lives many years, let him enjoy himself in all of them, remembering how many the days of darkness are going to be. The only future is nothingness! – Ecclesiastes 11:8.

I don’t think we need to get too excited about the “nothingness!” aspect to appreciate the basic idea that what you mean to spend on yourself, you may as well. 

On a more anecdotal note from my years as an advisor, I think that having something in the next bucket I’ll mention makes doing this much easier. 

How you think about the slice of your money that is what we’re calling Eternity money is perhaps quite different. Money that you don’t see yourself ever spending- money that will end up in other people’s hands for good or ill- that’s what we’re calling Eternity money. Many of us will have such money, and the wise among us will learn to differentiate that from what we should be spending in the here and now. 

So, too, I loathed all the wealth that I was gaining under the sun. For I shall leave it to the man who will succeed me— and who knows whether he will be wise or foolish?—and he will control all the wealth that I gained by toil and wisdom under the sun. That too is futile.- Ecclesiastes 2:13

Koheles gives us permission to feel uncertain about this money. He is very concerned about it being used poorly. Koheles presumably remains the steward of this sum. For our textual analysis purposes, I’ll note that we should assume that Ecclessaistes is King Solomon. That’s the historical interpretation. It matters because Koheles purports to be the wealthiest person at the time, perhaps in history up to the point at which he writes this text. He doesn’t tell us he’s about to put down his pen and fully divest from all of his holdings beyond his ability to consume, and indeed that’s not what King Solomon went out and did (at least not in the Hebrew Bible). 

So why would you remain the temporary steward of something – with all of the tax consequences, pain of financial loss, and more than occasional desires to splurge on any number of vacations, yachts, watches, paintings, etc., that market economies tempt you with- only to leave it all to someone or something that may not merit your trust? 

For some people, the answer to that question is that Trusts, Charitable Trusts, Endowments, and all manner of strings end up getting attached to their Eternity money in the interest of minimizing the risk of futility. Vetting the right institutions, people, and even family members for maximum utility of remainder funds becomes a pastime and, occasionally, primary preoccupation of the retiree. I can’t say there’s anything wrong with this approach and indeed, I facilitate this process on a regular basis for a living. I can hardly complain about it too much! 

On the other hand, in the text, Ecclesiastes is in the process of accepting the uncertainty of it all. I do think that investors benefit from at least going through the philosophical exercise of assuming your unspent Capital may end up in a place you would deem unworthy. The Board of Directors of your favorite charity could get populated by people you dislike for aims that are not exactly righteous. I recently watched the movie Nope (highly recommend it for Sci Fi fans, by the way), and maybe extraterrestrial interests get their hands on some or all of your resources after you’re gone (that’s not too much of a spoiler alert, fyi). An Eternity consciousness implicitly accepts a great deal of uncertainty when it comes to the before and after phases of our lifetimes.

To me, the point of Ecclesiastes is that making what you do matter is the only thing that can ameliorate the awareness of  the temporary timeframe we exist in within the unfathomable expanse of time. Somehow, it does actually matter when and what happens even though much happened before that we don’t know about and much will happen after us that we know even less about. I write that because it’s the textually correct thing to tie the thread of this blog post together with. Yet, even as I do, I have very little means of understanding how or whether it’s true. It’s why I will surely come back to this text next year and there will be another entry of this blog series. 

In short, steward your Eternity money as if you know it will be used poorly well after you’re gone. In this Eternity consciousness we’re talking about, Solomon doesn’t step down from being King just because he worries his heirs will be losers. He is still looking to be the best King because it’s his role. His role is steward. He builds things that will see their fates well beyond the lifetimes of even his kids and his grandkids. Irresponsibility of the latter (the prospective heir and beneficiary) doesn’t absolve the responsibility of the former (i.e. you, Koheles, etc.).