You’re Not Touching That Money for Ten Years. Why Watch It Every Day?

While I’m building a house, something strange is true about it. It has no price. Nobody publishes what the lot is worth at two in the afternoon. No number updates on it overnight, and if I wanted to panic and sell the whole project some random Tuesday, I couldn’t do it fast. Getting out would take months. I’ve been doing real estate deals for over twenty five years, buying and remodeling and selling, and ground up building is the newest thing I do and the slowest by far. The no-price part could read as a cost. To me it’s turning out to be the biggest advantage in the whole deal, because for its entire life, the only thing I can do is keep building.

Now look at what you own. The good stuff, I mean. If you own stocks or funds, in your retirement accounts or anywhere else, then you own pieces of real businesses, because that’s all a stock is, and that means you own the same kind of thing I build. Value that takes years to become what it’s becoming. But yours comes with a live price attached, updating all day, every day, and a sell button that works in seconds. So money you set aside for a decade gets asked to defend itself every single afternoon. Nothing about the business changed between lunch and dinner. Only the number did.

And the slowest money in your life might not even be in an account. If you’ve spent years building a career, or equity in a company you helped build with your own work, that’s your version of my two-year build, except longer. The value got created by showing up and doing the work, month after month, long before it ever showed up in a number. Just remember, the day part of it turns into money you can actually touch, that’s a new decision with its own clock, not a continuation of the old one.

So here’s what the slow side actually is, and it isn’t a product you can buy. It’s a decision about how you treat what you already own. Some of your money is doing a job measured in years, and the honest move is to say which money that is, and then treat it the way I get to treat month nine of a build. A number that will matter eventually, and means almost nothing today. One honest warning with it. Leaving something alone doesn’t make it good. Time only helps when the thing has something real going for it, a business that earns, or work being done on it, or people who actually need it. If what you’re holding never had any of that, holding it longer doesn’t fix it, it just spreads the same mistake over more years.

I gave up the right to sell fast, and what I got back was the ability to think in years. You still have the button, so the years have to come from you.

Talk Friday.

— Mateo