Our friend and future podcast guest, John Jennings, wrote a thoughtful piece in his IFOD blog that captured our team’s full attention. His post on Clayton Christensen, who recently passed away from leukemia, was enough to have some of us circling back to reread Christensen’s book How Will You Measure Your Life?  A long time professor at the Harvard Business School, Christensen challenged his students to find answers to three questions:

1. First, how can I be sure that I’ll be happy in my career?
2. Second, how can I be sure that my relationships with my spouse and my family become an enduring source of happiness?
3. Click to read the rest of the story…

It’s that time of year—investors are eager for advice and herds of “thought leaders” are competing for your attention to tell you what to do during the new year. Instead of adding to the cacophony of 2020 to-do lists, we’re switching it up by telling you what to ignore.

We’re big fans of the author and celebrated podcast host Tim Ferriss’ Not-To-Do-List, so we decided to put our own twist on his concept.

“Not-to-do lists are often more effective than to-do lists for upgrading performance,” says Ferriss. “The reason is simple: what you don’t do determines what you can do.”

Below are four types of financial information that, at best, waste time and, at worst, create stress and anxiety. It’s our hope that you’ll ignore them so you can stay focused and productive, and live richly.

Any Variation of the Headline: “X Stocks to Buy”

The 4+ billion Google results for “stocks to buy in 2020” aren’t just risky—they’re almost certainly doomed to flop.

“The track record of expert forecasters is as dismal as ever,” says David Epstein, author of Range. “In business, esteemed forecasters routinely are wildly wrong in their predictions of everything from the next stock-market correction to the next housing boom.”

As our co-founder Rick Hill says, “Stop trying to find the needle in the haystack—just buy the haystack,” which is what our clients do.

Stock Market News and Notifications

Just like watching what you eat keeps you fit and healthy, a low information diet can keep you calm and focused, especially when it comes to your personal finances. As important as the latest headlines might seem, it’s important to remember: The media’s job isn’t to keep you informed, it’s to keep you tuned in 24/7/365 so they can sell advertising. We stay tuned in to what matters over the long term, so that you can focus on what matters today. That’s the kind of tradeoff we like.

Your Short-Term Portfolio Performance

It’s nice to have our sleek app that puts your entire investment portfolio in your pocket, but that doesn’t mean you should monitor it incessantly. Redefine how you measure success – we suggest measuring your performance against your goals in terms of decades and generations rather than 24-hour news cycles.

Financial Advice from Anybody Without a Fiduciary Standard

As Matt Hall covered in his book, Odds On, most big-name brokerage firms prize sales quotas and their compensation over client care and education. In any industry, a convergence of greed and incompetence is dangerous. In wealth management, the consequences can be life-shattering for you and your family. 

Before considering any financial advice, always ask: Is our relationship a fiduciary? If the answer is anything besides, “Yes, always” or if the written version is accompanied by an asterisk and a bunch of legalese, ignore it.

It’s great to pick up new productive habits, but sometimes the best way to improve your life is by subtracting, not adding. You might surprise yourself with how much you accomplish with the extra breathing room.

We work for our clients. It’s that simple. We value the work of our partner firms (mutual fund companies and custodians), but we never forget who we serve and our fiduciary duty to them. To that end, you should know we routinely ask our partners for better options and lower fees – when and where appropriate. Hill Investment Group is pleased to announce significant fee reductions related to 14 funds in our recommended portfolios. The largest reduction is a 20% drop in fund expenses and the smallest change is 3.6% in one of our fixed-income solutions. Big or small alterations, it’s good news and savings for clients. We will not list individual funds here, but look forward to sharing the details with you during your next review. For now, we end this post with a quote from Dimensional Co CEO Gerard O’Reilly:

“We expect to do better than benchmarks and peers, after fees, so we fight for every basis point. We continue to gain insights from research and innovate across all aspects of our process.”