In today’s episode, I want to explain the concept of the Life Portfolio. There are 7 different stocks that make up the Life Portfolio. Similar to what we want in normal investing, we want a well-balanced, well-diversified, successful portfolio to return well, to return on your life well. It’s really the idea that I want you to flourish in all parts of your life.

I think that sometimes that we can get focused just on the money part of our portfolio and our life, but there are other components to it. Money impacts all parts of our life in a lot of cases, but it’s important to recognize that we want each of the other elements in our portfolio, other stocks in our portfolio to do well. So, I want to go through half of those today and in the next episode, I’ll go through the other half. My goal is to give you a quick understanding of how I view those and why each of them are important.

#1 Financial Capital – Your financial capital is your money stock if you will. It’s the one everyone thinks of anyways. It’s in some cases the only one people think of. It’s kind of like having a concentrated stock in a real investment portfolio where it kind of dominates everything else. As a wealth manager, we’re always looking to diversify to reduce the risk to eliminate the impact of that in some cases. Moving away from complexity but to simplicity leads you to confidence and other feelings of freedom and peace of mind. You’ll start to also see expressions when that’s working well of generosity. There’s a direct study link correlation from generosity to life satisfaction.

#2 Vocational Capital – So, what I want to bring out is the next piece, which is your vocational capital, your work. And it could be that that’s for money or not, vocation or an avocation. The idea of where am I making a meaningful contribution, where my engagement in what I’m doing is high, where I have talent and skill alignment to do what I’m doing and I have an opportunity for personal achievement. I have an opportunity to win. We all like that idea where we’re pushing towards something that we can succeed. That’s part of having a work stock, that’s high functioning and returning well.

#3 Social Capital – The third component would be what I call social capital or your relationships. Anyone who’s had wealth recognizes that money does impact your relationships: friends, your family, in some cases your community can be impacted by your money in positive and negative ways. But it’s the idea that how do I have healthy relationships both with the money but with people in my life that’s generally where true wealth is found. It’s in our relationships and the people that we spend the most time with our family and our friends and how we want to influence those pockets of community or the community we live in. How are we going to use those relationships, have the money impact those for good?

#4 Experiential Capital – The fourth stock that we’re going to cover today is the experiential capital or what I call play. Your play stock. That’s where we’re doing things not for achievement, but just for the pure enjoyment of doing them. Just for the fun of it. Hobbies would be in this space, your interests, adventure, just going on an adventure, travel. Doing things that you haven’t done before.
These are the first four components in our 101 session of the Life Portfolio and the hope again is that we can have a balanced portfolio. We can think about each of these stocks and that we’re moving that portfolio and it’s creating the kind of dividends and return on our life that really matter to us and is designed in the way we want it, for the kind of outcome that we’re looking for in our life.

Hope this has been helpful and I look forward to talking to you next time!