Somewhere in your inbox right now there’s an invitation you’re going to accept. A dinner, a committee, a favour for someone you met once at a conference. It’s months away, so it costs nothing. Future you will have loads of time.
Future you never does.
The economist Tim Harford wrote about this in his Financial Times column back in 2015, and he put it better than anyone. “Every time we say ‘yes’ to a request,” he wrote, “we are also saying ‘no’ to anything else we might accomplish with the time.”
I still have the page ripped out, folded up and tucked into a book by Morgan Housel. I look at it when I need reminding.
It’s the oldest idea in economics. Opportunity cost: the true price of anything isn’t what you pay for it, it’s what you had to give up to get it. The dinner doesn’t cost an evening. It costs the evening you’d otherwise have had to spend on other things or more pointedly with other people.
The same logic runs straight through money, and it’s where it does the most damage, because the “no” is invisible. When you buy something, you see the thing. You never see the alternative you didn’t choose, the one that would have existed if you’d said no.
The extension on the house is a yes to more space. It’s also a no to retiring two years earlier. The second home is a yes to summers in Cornwall, and a no to the flexibility of holidaying anywhere in the world. Keeping a portfolio exactly as it is because changing it feels like effort is a yes to not thinking about it, and a no to whatever a better-organised version of that money might have done.
None of those yeses are necessarily wrong. The problem is only ever when they’re made without seeing the no.
For the people we work with, the scarcer budget is often not money anyway. It’s time. A senior professional earning well can usually afford the thing. What they can’t always afford is the hours, the attention, the energy, and those are spent with a far looser hand than money ever is. Nobody would sign a cheque without reading it. Plenty of us sign away our Saturdays without a second look.
Which is why the most useful financial question isn’t “can I afford this?” It’s “what am I saying no to?”
Harford’s column has a lovely twist at the end, and it’s the reason it stuck with me. If every yes is a no, then the reverse is true as well. Every no is a yes to something.
So, he explained, whenever he has to turn down a request from an acquaintance, he does something small. He types his wife’s email address into the bcc field.
“The awkward email to the stranger,” he wrote, “is also a tiny little love letter to her.”
It’s the best financial planning advice I’ve read that isn’t about finance at all. Know what your no’s are for. Then say them with a clear conscience, and, if you like, copy in the person they’re really for.
We help people in Hook and across Hampshire, Surrey, Berkshire, Sussex and Kent see what their money and their time are actually saying yes to, so the no’s are chosen on purpose.
Altor Wealth Management LLP is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA number 769033). Registered office: Landmark House, Station Road, Hook, Hampshire RG27 9HA. This article is general information, not personal advice. The value of investments can fall as well as rise. Quotations from Tim Harford, “The power of saying no,” Financial Times, January 2015.