Is your house big enough? Do you need more room? Will your family be happier in a bigger home?

I think my perspective on this issue was shaped a bit last week by a converation I had with a few members of an American family that has lived and worked most of the time over the last nine years in the foothills of the Himalayas.

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As I have intimated in some recent posts in my personal blog, my wife and I spent last week in Thailand with field staff of one of the international charities we help fund.

While there, I volunteered to work on the security detail. As I sat in front of the bookstore they had set up checking people’s ID tags, I stopped a couple of young girls because I couldn’t see their wristbands.

One of them looked at me with a bit more than passing interest: “Are you Mr. Holzmann?”

“Yes.”

She lit up. “We use Sonlight!”

I won’t bore you with the details of that portion of our conversation.

It turns out, they are two children in a family of five kids. They live somewhere in the foothills of the Himalayas and move twice a year to live with a certain nomadic water buffalo-herding tribe that has a summer home and a winter home.

Interesting people!

About 10 or 15 minutes after we began talking, their dad came up. And the subject matter of our discussion broadened a bit. I asked him more about their living circumstances and how one lives with nomads. –I had never met anyone from the West who had adopted and/or adapted to such a lifestyle.

For some reason I can’t remember now, at one point, the dad made a comment that has stuck with me: “When we go back to the States,” he said, “I have found that families with five or more kids always seem to have more room to invite us in than do families with only one or two children. Even families with huge houses and just one child: they never seem to have room to invite us to stay with them. But families with five kids–even though their houses are much smaller: they always have room.

“We may sleep on the floor (which is fine with us). But they always have room. The more kids they have, the more room they seem to have.”

My thought: The physical space is rarely the issue. More often, we are limited by the size of our heart.

Indeed, as I was thinking about what my new friend had to say, I remembered our family’s time in southern California 20 years ago.

We lived in an 800-square-foot hovel. I think that’s the right word. It had holes in the outside walls so big you could see daylight through them when it was light outside and, in the winter, the wind would blow the kitchen cupboards open. For the kids to go to the bathroom, they had to walk through every room in the house–from their room, through Sarita’s and my bedroom, through the living room area, through the kitchen, through the back hallway (where the water heater was) and into the bathroom.

All four children–two girls and two boys–shared a single bedroom

And y’know what? No one complained!

In fact, though we owned four beds (two bunkbeds), until just a few months before we moved (when our eldest daughter was about 11 and a half), all four children preferred to sleep in one bed. We used to talk about how they were like sausages in a container. They preferred to share the bed. There was something reassuring about that closeness, I think.

And our kids got along. They were close. Despite dramatic personality differences. Despite the age range. Despite the fact that they spent most of the time together because we were homeschooling as well.

The physical closeness, I think, actually contributed to our children interacting with each other. It helped enlarge their hearts to make room for others.

FWIW. I thought I’d share my thoughts.

And my prayer: May I have a heart big enough for whatever God calls me to . . . unhindered by my physical surroundings!

I mentioned that profits have to do with increased wealth; and increased wealth is not the same as cash. If we fail to understand those differences, we can run into some serious trouble.

I thought I would illustrate what I am talking about. Read the rest of this entry »

What are profits?

I don’t think most of us really understand the concept very well. In fact, I’ll include myself in the number who struggle to understand what profits are.

To illustrate: When you hear that a company made, say, $8 billion last year, what image comes to your mind? –For me, I tend to think: “Oh, wow! They have $8 billion in cash in a bank somewhere–$8 billion that they did not have the year before. “Profits” mean “cash.” That’s what we think.

I’m sure there are more technically correct definitions of the word profits, but here’s a the best working definition I’ve been able to come up with: Profits are any increase in assets for which a business does not have increased liabilities (or debts) other than to the owners. Put another way, profits are an increase in wealth–and (most important to understand–and something I still tend to forget!) wealth comes in many forms other than money!

I say this because, for the longest time, I thought of profits in the same way I thought of a paycheck: profits are the same thing as a paycheck. You take them, bring them to the bank, and buy stuff with them.

But that’s not the case. Read the rest of this entry »

Mark Nestmann writes in the Sovereign Society’s Offshore A-letter about how you can evaluate the financial health of the companies you rely upon for insurance.

Among his suggestions: Read the rest of this entry »

In my last post, I noted that, going in to your estate planning process, you need to answer three fundamental questions:

1. How many of the resources God has placed in your hands do you need in order to live your life as you believe you ought?
    
2. How many of the resources God has placed in your hands will benefit your heirs to help them live their lives as you would like them to be able to live?

   And, finally,

3. To what causes do you want to give what’s left over?

I said that, if you walk in without answers to those three questions, I can almost guarantee that your estate planning attorney will answer those questions for you . . . based on assumptions he or she will make in your behalf.

And what might those assumptions look like?

Here’s my experience. Most estate planning attorneys will assume you want to minimize taxes and, upon your death, pass everything you’ve saved over the course of your life–as much as possible–to your heirs: your children and grandchildren.

And beyond that?

“No assumptions.” –What else could you possibly want?

Well, let me raise some questions to see if even these assumptions are really what you want.

And in this post I hope simply to address the assumption of estate-transfer timing: the idea that your estate should pass to your heirs at your death. Read the rest of this entry »

Boy! Was I naive!

Kind of like my thinking with respect to estate planning ten years ago, I thought writing an Investment Policy Statement should be pretty straightforward. All I needed, I thought, was some professional help to give me the right words.

But I’ve discovered that is not the case at all–a discovery that is both frustrating (because it means I have a lot more work to do!) and happy at the same time (because I made the discovery; I haven’t made any more foolish or irrevocable mistakes in this area . . . yet).

Way beyond getting the “right words” on paper, Sarita and I need to answer some very fundamental questions–questions far deeper than the average investment advisor is likely to ask or help us answer. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday I posted a proposed draft copy of an IPS (Investment Policy Statement) our legacy planners gave me. I said I didn’t feel comfortable signing the document without further input . . . from our investment advisor himself and, perhaps, one or two other similar advisors.

Today I thought I would share some of the things I wrote to our investment advisor about the document. So here’s the cover letter I sent him: Read the rest of this entry »

Our legacy planners have urged us to create an Investment Policy Statement (IPS) that would enable outside onlookers (like my wife and me and/or our legacy planners, for instance) to say, “Yes, [our investment advisor] is living up to the requirements of our IPS. He or she is investing according to policy.” Or, “No. He has violated this parameter. He needs to come back into line.”

Right now, we have no such statement and, as a result, we can’t really be sure whether and to what extent our investment advisor is pursuing a particular plan or simply “going with the flow” of whatever happens to cross his mind at the moment.

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Originally, our legacy planners asked our investment advisor to give them copies of his current investment policies for our various accounts.

And our investment advisor objected to what looked like an attempt on their part to “butt in” on his area of expertise. “Why do they need to know about my investment policies? What does that have to do with legacy planning?” he asked.

Part of his concern arose from the fact that our legacy planners work for a firm that, in addition to legacy planning, offers investment advisory services. He was concerned they were “simply” going to attempt to second-guess him and, with 20-20 hindsight, demonstrate what a bad job he has done in the last year in the midst of our rather unprecedentedly awful market performance.

Our legacy planners were able to put that fear to rest. “We are not looking to steal your business. We charge the high fees we do so that we have absolutely no need to sell other services. Our services are completely separate from the ‘other side’ of the company. . . .”

Still, the question remained: “What does an investment policy have to do with legacy planning?” Read the rest of this entry »