NWP Monthly Digest | June 2026
I realize that our newsletter is arriving late this month. I apologize. As many of you with kids know all too well, May is the definition of chaos. I will leave it at that.
We’ve also had a lot going on at the Global World Headquarters of Noble Wealth Partners, starting with our recent registration with the SEC. In the grand scheme of things, this won’t change the way Noble Wealth Partners operates, but it is something Grant and I have long aspired to – achieving the milestone of becoming a large enough firm to move from being state registered (with Colorado) to being nationally registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission. This year we hit that milestone. We’re also in the process of welcoming a new financial advisor to our team, and we are excited to bring Rebekah Brooks on board this month.
Despite the relative lack of work-life balance recently, my wife and I still made time to enjoy ourselves a little, as well.
We had the pleasure of attending the Outside Days festival here in Denver last weekend. In their fourth year, they really have hit their stride. I would highly recommend anyone that enjoys a good festival concert to attend, whether you’re local to Denver or need an excuse to come visit the beautiful state of Colorado. The lineup for the concert series is impeccable, the activities on the grounds are outstanding, and you have the added bonus of guest speakers that are really changing the world for the better.
We kicked off our Saturday by sitting down to listen to the great José Andrés talk about life. If you’re unaware of chef José Andrés and his accomplishments, he is an extraordinary man known for brining traditional Spanish cuisine to the United States, building a massive restaurant empire, a James Beard Award winner, and most notably, founding the World Central Kitchen, a non-profit that coordinates sending chefs into disaster zones to help feed people in need. He is a force to be reckoned with and the definition of a purely good soul.
Andrés is a master storyteller, as well, and he spent his time on a number of different topics and how they impacted his life. At one point, he and the moderator began talking about Iberian ham (jamón ibérico) that is only made in specific regions of Spain and Portugal. “The only two ingredients added to the ham are salt and the air,” the moderator claimed. Andres pushed back, “there are actually three ingredients. Salt, air, and time. Time is the most precious resource we have in the world.” Emphasis mine.
As financial planners, we can spend all the time in the world in helping you save for retirement, planning when and how to take distributions from your account when you retire, and constantly keeping our eyes on taxes to help you make the most of your accumulated wealth. But nobody truthfully knows how much time they will have, and all of the financial planning in the world won’t allow you a few extra days if that isn’t in the cards for you.
I’ve shared this story in the past, but my mother passed away in 2005 due to complications from pneumonia. She was 62 years old. Her and my father always had dreams of what they would do together in retirement, but they weren’t given enough time together to be able to do it. No matter what your job is, or how much you save for retirement, or who prepares your taxes…it doesn’t matter if you don’t have enough time to enjoy it.
Life and the time you are afforded to live it is a series of experiences. Derek Hagen recently jumped into this concept in his Meaningful Money blog in a post called “Do the Math”.
“Your time is finite. Your loved ones’ time is finite. The experiences you share with them…also finite. Most of us know this abstractly. Almost none of us feel it concretely until something forces us to.” - Derek Hagen, Meaningful Money
I used to really recoil at the concept of trying to identify the number of days I potentially had left in my life. Many self-help gurus claim that it makes you appreciate the time you have available and will force you to live every day to the fullest. It just scared me.
Hagen talks about a very simple equation which is the foundation for our lives.
Total Experiences = Times Per Year X Number of Years
This can create some very harsh realities for anyone. If you know that your kids are getting older, you may start to realize that you only have 8 or 9 years left where all of you will be together for Christmas.
Or, as my wife and I recently discovered, only one more family trip where you can all be together. This summer, we’ll celebrate our 25th anniversary in Hawaii, and it’s likely the last trip we’ll be able to do with all three of our kids with us.
So, how are you going to spend your most precious resource?
I have an incredibly bad habit of wanting to “sit down for a minute and just look at my phone.” I’m 49 years old, and I promise you that 29 year old me never said those words. Perhaps this is something you are starting to notice about yourself, too. Social media and these little super computers that sit in our pockets all day long, no doubt, are causing society a lot of problems. But they’re also causing us to waste something that we will never be able to get more of.
Tim Ferriss recently discussed an article in Vulture called Your Feed is Fake (warning: behind a paywall) that had some points that really hit home for me.
“Joe Lim estimates that 90 percent of what you see on the internet is advertising in disguise, and he should know. For three years, Lim ran a company called Floodify, which at its peak operated 65,000 dummy social-media accounts used to drum up attention on behalf of paying clients. On a typical day, he says, Floodify posted 50,000 videos across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and X, all of them designed to pass for the unscripted output of ordinary users.
…
We’ve locked ourselves in the stupidest possible version of Plato’s cave, where what looks like the spontaneous consensus of the hive mind is often just shadows on the wall, put there by marketers, political operatives, foreign-influence campaigns, or anyone else with a few hundred bucks and something to sell. ‘Everybody is doing this now,’ Lim says.” - Vulture, Your Feed is Fake
One of the reasons I sometimes feel compelled to look at my phone is the fear that I’m going to miss something important. Isn’t that just completely ridiculous? And when you combine that with the fact that 90% of the stuff I’m sifting through in my anxious state of possibly missing something important, I’m just reading things posted by non-real people all designed to try and make me buy something I don’t need.
In the end, I bring all of this up because it’s something I think more financial planners need to understand. Accumulating wealth is important for a variety of reasons. Pretending that you don’t need to save for retirement isn’t a strategy, but neither is deciding that it’s OK to give up everything you enjoy so you can retire someday and really start living. I feel like it’s my job to make my clients understand that you can do both, if you plan well and you think about your decisions. Everything in life and with money is about tradeoffs, but you can’t make a good decision if you don’t know what that tradeoff is.
Do you realize?
That everyone you know, someday, will die.
But instead of saying all of your goodbyes,
Let them know you realize that life goes fast,
It’s hard to make the good things last,
You realize the sun doesn’t go down,
It’s just an illusion caused by the world spinning ‘round. - The Flaming Lips | Do Your Realize??
(I sat listening to them play this song live last Saturday night as tears streamed down my face. Don’t forget to live.)
Noble Wealth Pro Tip of the Month
It would be crazy for me to tell you that summer is a great time to do anything that involves your personal finances when I just talked about how important it is to live your life and enjoy your experiences, but I do think that June is a great time to do a quick review of your insurance coverages. I know…nobody wants to do this. But this is exactly what I spend time with my clients reviewing when the weather turns hot and everything slows down a little.
Are you paying more for homeowner’s insurance? Why? Call your insurance agent. Do you have enough life insurance? Do you have any life insurance? What about a will? And, maybe most importantly, have you reviewed your beneficiaries you have in place for all of your accounts?
Again, we don’t know how much time we are given on this Earth. These are things that are non-negotiable and will make it much easier to sleep at night if you take care of it now.
Things We’re Reading and Enjoying
Do the Math - Derek Hagen, Meaningful Money
If you see your father six times a year and he's 78 with maybe two years left, you have 12 dinners. Not "some dinners." Not "I should see him more." Twelve.
If your kids are 10 and 12 and you take one family vacation a year until the youngest leaves for college, you have about 10 trips left. Six before they're adults. Maybe three or four before they'd rather do something else.
“There is nothing noble about being superior to your fellow man. True nobility is being superior to your former self.” - Ernest Hemingway
