Remember the book The Millionaire Next Door? Our office enjoyed this popular book because it highlights the traits that show up in many successful families who will never be in the spotlight. We were reminded of some of these same lessons when we revisited a “tortoise and hare” story shared by financial writer Morgan Housel. In it, Housel compares the investment success of business secretary Grace Groner with the supposedly bad breaks that befell business executive Richard Fuscone.

Groner lived a modest life, with a sturdy but quiet career. She reportedly bought $180 worth of her company’s stocks in the 1930s … and never sold them. When she passed away in 2010 at age 100, her net worth was $7 million, which she left to charity. Granted, she was lucky to select a successful investment, but we would suggest her true success was grounded in her steadfast investing.

In contrast, Fuscone is Harvard-educated and a former vice chairman of Merrill Lynch’s Latin American division. And yet, in 2010, he declared personal bankruptcy, reportedly stating, “I have been devastated by the financial crisis which came to a head in March 2008 … I currently have no income.”

We share Housel’s sentiments, when he says, “These stories fascinate me. There is no plausible scenario in which a 100-year-old country secretary could beat Tiger Woods at golf, or be better at brain surgery than a brain surgeon. But – fairly often – that same country secretary can out-finance a Wall Street titan. Money is strange like that.”

Enjoy this short (true) story by one of the great personal finance writers of our time. *No need to read the full report unless you really get inspired.

We liked our most recent quarterly client letter so much we decided to share it again, and more publicly …

It’s a tradition in medical schools for students to stand together and recite the Hippocratic Oath, a pledge to uphold the responsibilities, ethics and values of their new profession. The medical oath dates back to between fifth and third centuries BC. We are sure you’ve heard of the Hippocratic Oath, and we encourage you to look it up if you’ve never read it.

This commitment to the statement, both in the original version and in modern updates, affects all of us because we rely on the medical community’s expertise and compassion to keep us healthy. This oath is especially relevant to Hill Investment Group because of the language it uses. New doctors must affirm their respect for established science and commit themselves to share their knowledge with the world. They also pledge to always put patients’ needs first and to serve them with compassion, specifically reminding doctors that they’re not treating a medical chart or a disease, but a human being.

Sound familiar? It did to us, which is why we were inspired to adopt a similar pledge. Of course, our fiduciary duty already legally binds us to serve our clients’ interests, but we wanted an even stronger statement that fully encapsulates the Hill Investment Group experience. We call our version the “Hillocratic Oath.”

Our Values

• We are a team who honors the trust people place with us to manage their financial lives.
• We respect peer-reviewed academic research and use it as the basis for our investment philosophy.
• We work solely for our clients, offering steady guidance when investing is easy – and especially when it isn’t.
• We strive to continuously improve our techniques for managing money and human behavior.
• We advocate for the whole client and work to create value in big ways and small.
• With these commitments firmly in our minds, we at Hill Investment Group will continue to enrich the lives of our clients and one another.

Our oath reflects the importance of the service we provide clients. While doctors are literally dealing with matters of life and death, we have our own unique responsibility: acting as trusted, experienced and compassionate advocates for your financial health.

Financial success is critical to achieving your most cherished goals and the lifestyle you desire. For most people, that lifestyle includes more important uses for their time than managing investments – even for those with the skill and expertise to do it themselves. Building true multigenerational wealth comes from a unique collaboration between clients putting their talents to work to generate assets, and a fiduciary partner helping to ensure that any money not needed to cover immediate needs is put to work for the long-term. Our pledge acknowledges that we are not just stewards of your wealth, but important allies who free you to put your time to its highest and best use.

Our oath also acknowledges the commitment we have made to each other as members of the Hill Investment Group team as well as to you, our clients. For 14 years, we’ve been building a modern model for the financial advisory industry. As we continue to grow and evolve, we know that our continued success depends on the expertise, passion and commitment of each person working toward our shared goals.

We are proud to share this statement of our values. Thank you for the trust you place in us and for helping inspire us to put into words the values that guide every Hill Investment Group relationship.

Financial writer and friend Wendy Cook posted the following piece on her own blog recently, and granted us permission to share it here.

We like Wendy’s post and applaud the ideas of the late Hans Rosling because his work parallels our own emphasis on evidence-based investing. His bestselling book Factfulness points out that our instincts and biases often make it difficult to perceive the world factually. Just as we point out in our work with you, and as we’ve highlighted in past reviews of Michael Lewis’ book Moneyball, it’s tricky work to get out of our own heads and better understand the world through data and evidence minus emotion and instinct.

*Keep in mind Wendy writes for a special group of advisors.

Facts, Finance, and Feeling Good About Yourself

by Wendy J. Cook

Recently, I finished reading Factfulness by Hans Rosling. I discovered Rosling’s work nearly a decade ago when his YouTube video “200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes” went viral, at least among us data-dorks.

Finding Factfulness

Making the leap from Rosling’s four-minute video to his full-length book took some time. Unfortunately, it was time Rosling himself did not have, having passed away from pancreatic cancer in February 2017. Reminiscent of the late Gordon Murray’s inspiring collaboration with Dan Goldie on The Investment Answer, Rosling dedicated the last year of his life to completing Factfulness. He collaborated on it with his son and daughter-in-law, who published it in 2018.

Referring to “data as therapy” and “understanding as a source of mental peace,” Rosling urges us to employ “factfulness” to recognize that the world is usually better off than we think. With Bill Gates describing it as “one of the most educational books I’ve ever read,” I figured it was worth checking out.

Factfulness and Finance

How does factfulness work? Without it, we become overwhelmed by all the bad news going on around us. With it, the greater facts remind us that historical conditions have been even worse. In other words, we are making enormous progress, but close up, we can’t see it. Rosling explains:

“Journalists who reported flights that didn’t crash or crops that didn’t fail would quickly lose their jobs. Stories about gradual improvements rarely make the front page even when they occur on a dramatic scale and impact millions of people. … Safe flights are not newsworthy.”

It’s easy to connect these messages with the same ones you likely espouse for yourself and your clients as you help them embrace evidence-based investing.

A Higher Purpose

Beyond that, I took a greater message from the book. If your advice has been incorporating insights gained from behavioral psychology, it’s one you’re already familiar with, but it bears repeating: By losing sight of factfulness, it may often feel as if BIG acts, ENORMOUS effort and MAJOR improvements – the kinds we read about in the paper – are the only changes that matter.

All facts considered, this could not be further from the truth. Ordinary, everyday accomplishments are what Rosling describes as “the secret silent miracle of human progress.” Your and my small, unsung deeds are the streams that feed rivers that run to oceans of accomplishment.

So, whether it’s going that extra mile for your clients or dedicating some time to a community project, let’s each take on one or two good deeds – today, tomorrow, and the day after that. They don’t have to be huge; just make them a habit and, over time, that will do.

Give the Gift of an Amazon Review

Here’s one small possibility you may not have thought of: Give a good financial book a positive Amazon review.  

You see, some of my best friends are financial authors. So, I happen to know, one of the best ways you can help them increase their sales and readership is to review their books on Amazon. These days, a strong presence there is electronic gold, like being in the “featured books” section of a brick & mortar store.

Your review need not be novel-length itself. Two minutes, five stars, and a few sentences should do it. Go ahead. Pick some of your recent favorite financial reads, and go to it.