Priceless Weath — Lucien, Stirling & Gray Advisory Group Financial Advisor Austin Texas

Priceless Wealth

True wealth comes in many forms, and plenty of incredibly valuable investments have very little to do with money. If you’ve been reading these essays for any length of time, you have seen me express these deeply held beliefs before.

And though much of what we do on a day-to-day basis at Lucien, Stirling & Gray is focused on taking responsibility for handling the prudent management of long-term investment assets, and implementing carefully considered long-range financial planning decisions for our clients, these responsibilities comprise only two of the many efforts we engage in to help people lead principled lives of consequence and overall well-being.

Far more important in the grand scheme is understanding the reasons why. Why are you investing in the first place? What are the values, the beliefs, and the underlying motivations that drive your investment behavior? (And I’m not just referring to financial investments here.) What do they say about you as an individual? What do you hope to secure, for yourself and for others, in the process? Who are the people and what are the experiences that are most important to you? What are the circumstances and the outcomes you’re trying to create through your actions in the long term? What gives you a sense of deep appreciation, satisfaction and joy? How will you define success?

Obviously, each of us is different. Each of us has different motivations, different values, different experiences, different circumstances, and different beliefs. We may have plenty of similarities, and we may share all kinds of commonalities, but almost never will anyone find even two people who are exactly the same. Our differences could be quite subtle, but it is through the combination of all these subtle differences and variations that we are made unique as individual human beings.

Speaking for myself and on a professional basis, it is in going deep, and in exploring and uncovering these unique motivations and subtle variations between individual clients (and between individual colleagues and friends) and then thoughtfully tying them back to a set of meaningful, long-range, personal objectives, and then to a solid, time-tested investment approach that increases the probability of achieving those objectives that brings me the greatest sense of appreciation, satisfaction, and joy. I consider myself incredibly fortunate to be able to do what I do with people I like and trust, and to do it for people who like and trust me.

On a personal basis, I enjoy exploring and going deep into wild and remote places, too, as anyone who has read these thought pieces for long already knows. I prize my wilderness adventure trips as critical investments in my individual sense of wealth and well-being. They feed my soul. They challenge me to grow, to be flexible, and to appreciate the unexpected. They nourish my sense of wonder and awe at the natural world, and they increase my sense of joy and appreciation for this fleeting journey we call life.

The privilege of doing those things with two groups of trustworthy compatriots who share common values and who work closely and cooperatively with each other is a rare and precious thing. I draw analogies between what the “Plan B Paddlers” experience on those expeditions into remote places where we’ve never been before, and what’s similarly demanded of this seasoned team at Lucien, Stirling & Gray to confidently guide our clients into an unknown and unknowable future.

Our most recent wilderness trip was in early September into the Boundary waters of northern Minnesota, along the US border with Canada. For seven days we were completely off the grid, with no access to phone calls, emails, text messages, or any outside communication. Our cell phones were great cameras, but nothing more. No internet, no “bars”, no nothing. We covered 70 miles of lake paddling in 7 days, along with approximately 4½ miles of portaging our gear and boats between lakes and around waterfalls, over rugged trails that were first blazed by native peoples many hundreds or thousands of years before European trappers and explorers ever walked those woods.

That region is estimated to contain fully 20% of the globe’s freshwater supply, and it is some of the cleanest water left on the planet. We carried a hand operated pump to fill our water bottles, and a 10-liter gravity bag to hang from a tree branch in the evening (both equipped with anti-bacterial filters) so we drank and cooked with lake water. It was sweet, delicious, and abundant.

Nights were cool and filled with billions of stars stretching from horizon to horizon, causing whatever human problems and worries any of us might have had to just disappear into utter insignificance in the awesome breadth of space. There was not a man-made light to be seen as the eerie calls of loons echoed across the inky blackness of the water. The warmth of a campfire, and the soft strumming of Mark, the “Canoe Sherpa”, on his guitar as he gigged nightly for the rest of us, were the only reminders of civilization. Close friendship like that is priceless.

Like any investment, a journey such as this includes risks. Weather conditions vary widely, and they can change in an instant. “Help” is far away and hard to reach. Physical challenges, like encountering 20 mph headwinds, or carrying a 40 lb. pack and a canoe on your shoulders for a mile or two over uneven trails and slippery boulders, demand preparation and careful attention. But like the folks here at LSG, “Plan B” is a highly adaptable team of planners and preparers. Since 2016, all have proven themselves highly capable of overcoming tough challenges together – with never a bitter word ever spoken on every trip we’ve ever done. Confidence and trust like that are priceless.

Thank you for your confidence and trust. They too are priceless.

Thomas G. Twombly

President