Moving Day
We moved! Fortunately, it’s just across the hall. We’ve talked for awhile now about the lack of space we have both in our individual offices and for storage & files. When the larger office across the hall came available, we jumped on it! Let me just say, it’s amazing how refreshing a small change of scenery can be.
This move across the hall may appear to be a fairly insignificant, physical move, but it is symbolic of the career Ed has created and the one he has taught me to create. This year, Ed celebrates 38 years in the business and I celebrate 8. In that time, we’ve found that changing things up, rethinking our way of operating, throwing out the playbook and starting over, or even just adjusting our vantage point slightly on a regular basis is so important. It’s easy in our job to get comfortable and resist the need to change and adapt. We find what works for us and our clients and push forward while being tempted to ignore the changing landscape around us. Ed has said many times, he owes his success partly to his willingness to reinvent himself every 5-ish years. He has successfully stamped those words on my career as well. So, what does it mean to reinvent yourself in an industry that has been around for hundreds of years?
It means that we challenge our own way of thinking on a very regular basis. We read articles we know we won’t agree with and watch news we know will make our blood boil. It means we create our idea (or portfolio or scenario) and then do everything we can to prove it wrong, to make it fail, to find a better alternative. We poke holes in our way of thinking and invite others to do the same. We look to our savvy, engaged clients to tell us what we aren’t thinking about and what we aren’t seeing. And fortunately, the two of us, although uncannily similar in thinking, have two very different viewpoints as an empty nester in his early sixties and a mom of preschoolers in her thirties. We naturally question one another’s thinking and open each other’s eyes to aspects we may not have considered.
So, what was once the rule of 6% is now the rule of 4%. While we love our rule of 72 for its simplicity and ease of calculating, given our expectations of the stock market for the coming years, we know it’s likely a little rich and requires an open dialogue. With interest rates near zero, a 60/40 portfolio may no longer fulfill the needs it once did. But, we’ve said it before and we will say it again, with change comes opportunity. With the changing world around us, our willingness to adapt and rethink our way of doing business will continue to serve us and our clients well.
All this to say, welcome to our new office! We are so excited to be here! We do so much of our work on the phone that we have a lot of clients who have never actually seen our office, so we wanted to share a few pictures.
We exchanged our pond view to be creekside and are loving the peaceful sounds of the flowing creek outside our windows.
Even the boys got a little office upgrade.
