Convergence of Health and Wealth 2: Common Factors

Before we dive in, I gotta riff on this one thing.

There are three weeks of winter left.

For those who are having a cold one with a ton of snow and/or power outages, hang in there. It's been extra ridiculous coming on the heels of the pandemic, I know it.

It feels like it will never end.

But it will end. April’s coming and May behind her and longer, warmer days are imminent.

Vaccine distribution is growing more efficient, the world will soon reopen, and we will never have been more thankful for what we have.

Convergence of Health and Wealth Part 2: Common Factors

(Thanks everyone for the emails - if I have not gotten back to you yet, I will this week. I had a busy weeks last week and my inbox is a dumpster fire.)

This is Part 2 in a continuous series exploring the Convergence of Wealth and Health Planning. You can find Part 1 Here where I summarize the general thesis:

To integrate systems, it’s helpful to begin planning by looking at common factors. 

This supports the rationale for the work and it provides threads of complementarity. 

Common Factors

So what critical factors do Personal Wealth and Health Planning have in common?

Future Quality of Life

Importantly, personal wealth and health planning share a primary goal - Improving Our Future Quality of Life Over Time.

We plan our financial future, save money, optimize for taxes, and allocate in order to improve our quality of life when we retire.

Similarly, we plan our future health by taking care of ourselves in the present by eating nutritious foods, exercising regularly, and sleeping enough.

This commonality is the base of what we are building here.

Time-Perspective

The ability to plan out into the distant future is dependent upon our capacity in the area of long-term time perspective. 

This is a component of our cognitive functioning that we don’t often consider but it is crucial to navigating life successfully - to think about and imagine the future concretely and to act in the present based, in part, on those thoughts.

Maintaining a long-term time perspective is critical to both.

Time

Health and wealth occur over long periods of period of time - usually 20 years or more.

This is a critical common factor to consider for suitable and sustainable program development. We want to build an integrative system that can be maintained over many years.

Knowledge

You need the know how.

In personal wealth planning, there are countless things implement - tax planning, allocation and changes to it as we approach retirement, estimating how much we’ll need, planning for our children’s education, care for our aging parents, health care, insurance and estate planning etc. There’s a lot.

In personal health planning, it’s similar. There’s a lot to know. 

What are the things to do in order to get healthy, to stay healthy, avoid injury, adapt for age, what do we eat, what should we avoid, what supplements should we take, what tests do we need and when do we need them etc etc.

Community and Structure

Being connected to people and organizations over the lifespan is crucial to both health and wealth planning in terms of support, knowledge, and camaraderie. We’re social animals (and learners).

This might include professionals, peers, mentors, clubs and other organizations etc.

Having a strong network is key to sustaining any worthwhile and challenging endeavor over an extended period of time. The sense of belonging alone is worth the price of admission.

Automation

There is one critical uncommon factor that is worth a mention here, one where things are different between health and wealth planning and it matters as we think through systemic integration.

Wealth planning has done an incredible job automating, beginning with, perhaps, the greatest Nudge of all time - automated 401k contributions.

By contrast, you can’t automate health planning. Not even a little bit. You can have the greatest plan in the world, all the knowledge etc - and still sit on your butt and eat ring dings all day.

Ok, so this is long enough for now.

In two weeks, I will pick this back up and discuss what a simple integrative solution might begin to look like within 2 contexts.