Weekend Reading For Financial Planners (March 8-9)

GOP Debates Whether Tax Cuts Will “Cost” $4 Trillion… Or Nothing

(Richard Rubin | Wall Street Journal)

One of the biggest priorities of the Republicans who now control the U.S. House, Senate, and presidency is to pass tax legislation that will replace the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), most of which is set to “sunset” at the end of this year. Most Republicans want to extend or even expand upon TCJA’s tax cuts; however, because they lack a 60-vote majority in the Senate that would overcome any Democratic filibuster, they must rely on the process of “reconciliation” that allows the passage of budget-related bills with only a simple majority.

One of the first steps of the reconciliation process is for Congress to pass a budget resolution that sets a “blueprint” for the total cost of the bill, and on February 25 Republicans in the House of Representatives passed a budget resolution that set a maximum $4.5 trillion cost for their planned tax bill. Which in effect means that whatever bill Congress passes must include no more than $4.5 trillion in total tax cuts over the 10-year window that covers the current budget. Additionally, to conform with the Senate’s “Byrd Rule” governing the reconciliation process, the bill can’t contain any total cuts that extend beyond that 10-year window.

Except there’s now debate among Republicans about what exactly constitutes a tax “cut”: Should the cost of any of the new bill’s tax provisions be compared to where taxes are now (i.e., the TCJA rules in effect through the end of 2025), or to where taxes will be (after reverting to pre-2018 rules in 2026, as the current law dictates)?

If it’s the current law, then any calculation of the bill’s cost will assume that TCJA would have expired as planned, and so the pre-2018 tax law would be considered the “baseline” – in which case, simply extending TCJA’s current provisions will take up most of the $4.5 trillion target cost for the bill, with little wiggle room for further cuts that Republicans want to make (like the president’s “no tax on tips” proposal, an increase in the State and Local Tax (SALT) deduction cap, or an elimination of the estate tax).

However, some Republicans want to treat the tax rules under TCJA as the “baseline” – which would make extending the existing law effectively “free” in regards to the budget calculation, and open up the entire $4.5 trillion blueprint target for additional tax cuts. But even among Republicans who generally favor tax cuts, this approach is divisive. It effectively treats the extension of TCJA as a given – even though TCJA is set to expire by law at the end of 2025, which it had to do in order to pass through the reconciliation process to begin with. Or put differently, if a current Congress can put an expiration date on a bill to pass it through reconciliation today, only for a later Congress to treat it as permanent when it comes time to pass the next bill, it effectively makes the 10-year budget rule (and by extension, the whole reconciliation process) meaningless, and simply becomes a way to pass permanent tax cuts through a process that is explicitly not intended for laws that have a permanent budgetary impact.

Ultimately, it’s yet to be seen which direction Congressional Republicans will decide on. On the one hand, Republicans have a long list of priorities that they’d like to achieve while they have a majority in both houses of Congress and a president in the White House, and treating the extension of TCJA’s provisions as “free” gives them much more budgetary leeway to include those priorities in the new bill. But on the other hand, concerns about the rising deficit (and rising bond yields that further increase the cost of borrowing to fund the tax cuts) are giving even some Republicans pause about pressing too far ahead with additional tax cuts. But with Republicans aiming to have a tax bill passed through both houses of Congress by Memorial Day, we’ll likely find out soon one way or another whether the next tax bill will more of a TCJA extension, or if it will aim for tax cuts even beyond what’s already baked into TCJA.

Treasury Pulls The Plug On Beneficial Ownership Information Reporting Requirements

(Anna Sulkin Stern | Wealth Management)

It’s been nearly four years since Congress passed the Corporate Transparency Act, which required many businesses transacting in the U.S. to file reports disclosing information about their “beneficial owners”. Over that time, however, there’s been a whipsaw-like back-and-forth of developments affecting whether or not the new Beneficial Ownership Information (BOI) reporting requirements would be (or could be) enforced. The requirements were originally set to go in effect on January 1, 2024 (with a January 1, 2025 BOI reporting deadline for existing companies), but since then the requirements have been alternately paused and then reinstated by a dizzying series of decisions in various U.S. courts. In recent days, however, it seemed as though the uncertainty about the future of the BOI reporting requirements was finally close to being cleared up once and for all, as a U.S. District Court decision reinstated the requirements and FinCEN established a new reporting deadline of March 21.

However, over the last week the whipsaw has again flown back in the other direction. First, on February 27 FinCEN announced that it would not be issuing any fines or penalties in connection to the BOI reporting deadlines pending a forthcoming Treasury rule pushing back the reporting deadline to a later date. And then, on March 2, the Treasury Department announced that it does not plan to enforce any penalties associated with the rule for U.S. citizens or companies, permanently. In effect, then, this means that (at least for the foreseeable future) neither U.S. citizens nor companies based in the U.S. are subject to the BOI reporting requirements going forward.

In a way, the Treasury Department’s announcement is unsurprising given the Trump administration’s general opposition towards enforcing Biden-era regulations. And for business owners and their advisors, it might be a welcome development given that it seemingly eliminates any uncertainty over whether or not they’ll need to comply with the BOI reporting requirements. It’s worth noting, however, that regardless of whether or not the current Treasury department decides to enforce it, the Corporate Transparency Act, as a congressionally-enacted and presidentially-signed law, is still the law of the land. It’s plausible, for instance, that the administration could be sued and forced by the courts to enforce the law as written. And even if the Treasury department’s decision not to enforce BOI reporting requirements holds up for now, there’s no reason that a future administration couldn’t reverse that policy, unless Congress repeals the Corporate Transparency Act in the meantime.

The bottom line is that the current status of BOI reporting is that for U.S. citizens and businesses, there won’t be any penalty for not filing a BOI report, at least for the time being; while businesses considered “foreign reporting companies” (i.e., companies formed in a different company that have registered to do business in the U.S.) will need to wait until the Treasury Department’s new proposed rules are released for guidance on their own reporting requirements. But with the Corporate Transparency Act still on the books, this almost certainly won’t be the last time we hear about BOI reporting requirements – the only question is whether the final decision will be made by the courts, Congress, or a future presidential administration.

PE Investments Elicit Mixed Feelings Among Advisors And RIA Executives

(Alec Rich | Citywire RIA)

The last few years have seen a large infusion of private equity cash into the wealth management industry, as investors see opportunities to expand enterprise values by acquiring numerous firms to pull together under one umbrella and achieve the benefits of scale and cost synergies of centralized back-office and administrative operations (and, perhaps, a premium on their valuation due to their larger size). But while PE investment into the RIA space shows no signs of slowing down, and roll-up RIAs remain eager to pull smaller firms under their own brands, the feelings about PE investment are decidedly more mixed among advisors who work for the small and midsized RIAs that often find themselves the targets of PE-fueled acquisition, according to an informal poll recently conducted by Citywire.

The biggest concern among the advisors polled was the potential for PE ownership to degrade the quality of service provided to clients. Which makes sense given the extent to which advisors tend to focus on their client relationships: To an advisor who has spent years cultivating their client service culture, the thought of giving up control over the client experience to an outside manager who doesn’t know the unique needs and communication styles of each client could be harrowing (especially to the extent that their owners primarily measure outcomes by growth in enterprise value, rather than more ‘client-centric’ metrics of service). Additionally, for next-generation advisors at those firms, PE ownership can muddy the prospective path to ownership in the firm they work for: While many associate and service advisors are hired with at least an informal understanding that they could become partners or even sole owners in their firms one day, there’s little hope that a junior advisor could match the terms that a scaled-up, private equity-funded acquirer would be able to offer, such that at best the G2 advisor will simply became a very small fractional shareholder of a very large RIA enterprise.

What’s worth noting, though, is that no two acquisitions are completely alike, and there are undoubtedly many employees who have come out the other side of the acquisition happier than they were before. Still, the widespread ambivalence towards PE among advisors suggests that there is at least a perception of a disconnect between the professionalized, profits- and growth-first culture of private equity and the high-touch, relationship-quality-over-efficiency approach that’s prevalent among many independent advisory firms. Whether or not that’s the reality of any particular PE-funded acquisition, it’s clear that acquiring firms can at least make more effort to provide reassurance that an increase in size and scale won’t lead to a degradation of the quality of client relationships – since for many advisors, the relationships with their clients were the reason for getting into the advisory business in the first place.

How To Craft Effective Prompts To Create Content With AI

(Sierra Fredricksen | XY Planning Network)

In the two-plus years since the launch of ChatGPT brought generative AI into the mainstream, a number of use cases for AI have found traction among advisors: Client meeting note tools can quickly summarize transcripts of client meetings and generate follow-up tasks and client emails; document extraction tools can automatically “read” and pull key data from client documents like investment statements, tax returns, and estate planning documents; and AI-powered compliance tools can sift through reams of trade records, client communication, and marketing copy to flag suspicious activities for compliance review. However, one of the earliest uses for AI was (and still is) as a writing aid, to help reduce the time it takes to create clear and effective written communication.

The caveat is that, even though tools like ChatGPT can function as a “calculator for writing” that can quickly output coherent text, they still require inputs in the form of written “prompts” that tell the tool what to write. The tool relies entirely on the user’s prompt to know not only the subject of the content it’s making, but also the length, format (e.g., paragraph or bullet-point), and style of the response. And so in order to get a quality result from a generative AI tool, the prompt needs to be specific about what the AI tool’s task is (e.g., to write six social media captions about the value of financial planning), who the audience for the writing will be, how long or short it should be, and what sort of voice or tone the content should use (with examples of the advisor’s existing content often being the most effective way to ensure that the AI’s output matches the advisor’s own brand voice).

The key point is that although AI can be good at generating content that sounds like a human wrote it, its output won’t necessarily match the voice of the specific human that it’s supposed to emulate. The more generic or broad in scope that the prompt is, the more bland and robotic the result will be. And even when there’s a well-constructed prompt, the output might still need some tweaking to sound as authentic as if the advisor had written it themselves (and some fact-checking to ensure it hasn’t hallucinated any incorrect information or inadvertently plagiarized from another source). Which ultimately may add some time back to the process, but will still usually save time compared to the advisor writing the whole thing from scratch!

My Favorite AI Investment Research Tools

(Herb Greenberg | On The Street)

In the days before the Internet, doing research on a particular topic predominantly involved paper books and records – which, if you were lucky, were located on a bookshelf somewhere in your home or office; otherwise, a trip to a library or university might be the only way to find the needed information. Once the Internet came along, scads of research materials became digitized and available, but in the fragmented early days it wasn’t always easy to know where to go to access the material (or if it was even available online). Search engines like Google significantly improved the ability to find useful information by allowing users to scan virtually the entire Internet from one search bar, but there were still challenges stemming from the fact that search engines only return a list of websites, not the information itself, and it’s often necessary for users to click through numerous websites in order to find what they’re looking for.

AI tools have the potential to remove one more hurdle from the process of researching information by delivering results in the form of an actual answer to the user’s search query, rather than “just” a list of sources as is typically returned by a search engine. And while general-purpose tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, or Anthropic’s Claude can all answer general questions (though a follow-up fact check is still often necessary to insure against misleading or outright inaccurate responses), other industry-specific tools can be useful for researching more specialized topics for which general-purpose tools may be less reliable. For instance, in the investment research world, FinChat can create charts from its pool of investment data, while AlphaSense can quickly analyze the details of company earnings calls and filings, and ManagementTrack goes even further to analyze corporate earnings calls to flag the evasiveness of company management in answering questions.

The key point is that for doing research on specific topics, there is a growing list of options beyond the general-purpose AI tools that can help speed up the process of finding and summarizing key information. Although as with any new technology, the landscape is still constantly evolving: Tools regularly introduce new features and change their focus as business opportunities become apparent, and the relative quality between tools also seems to be ever-changing as the development teams race to improve their products. So rather than landing on one tool and sticking with it, it’s a good idea to try multiple tools and compare the results, since the “best” tool to answer one question might not do a great job with a different question, or even differ in its results from one day to the next. Which is ultimately an improvement on digging through stacks of books or paper filings to find the right answer, but (as with any hunt for information) still requires a human layer of evaluating the results to make sure they’re actually worth relying on!

Will AI Notetakers Short-Circuit Or Supercharge Next-Gen Advisor Training?

(Leo Almazora | InvestmentNews)

AI notetaking tools have been a hot topic in the AdvisorTech world over the last year or so, as tools like Jump, Zocks, and Finmate AI (and many others that have arisen on the Kitces AdvisorTech Map) allow advisors to streamline their meeting preparation and follow-up process. At a base level, these tools can record and transcribe client meetings, and with the resulting block of text they can generate a meeting summary email for the client, archive meeting notes in the advisor’s CRM for compliance purposes, and create follow-up tasks in the advisor’s task management software for any outstanding items. All of which, done manually, can take advisory firm staff an hour or more for each client meeting, resulting in the potential for significant time savings.

The caveat, however, is that at many advisory firms, the work that can now be done by AI notetaking tools would have been completed not necessarily by the advisor themselves, but by support staff such as an associate advisor or paraplanner. And although the manual work of meeting prep and follow-up can be time consuming, it can also be a way for next-generation advisors (who often start their careers in associate planner or paraplanner roles) to familiarize themselves with key aspects of the advisory role: Logging meeting notes can help reinforce the planning issues that were discussed during the meeting; writing follow-up emails provides a chance to practice client communication skills; and assigning follow-up tasks helps with internalizing the operational mechanics of the firm and the roles of the other team members. And so it’s understandable for associate advisors and paraplanners who consider their roles as part of their training for an eventual lead advisory role to worry that AI advancements could result in the elimination of so many formerly essential back-office tasks that they won’t be able to learn the skills they need to make the leap to a lead advisor role (or even worse, that they could be squeezed out of their current roles before they even get the chance to advance).

At the same time, however, there’s some reason to believe that AI-powered automation of manual tasks could have the opposite effect on training for next-generation advisors. With a portion of their time freed from logging meeting notes and assigning follow-up tasks, less-experienced advisors can spend more time on learning other skills that will be essential to their advancement, such as more advanced planning techniques and client meeting skills (made possible since they won’t be required to take notes throughout the meeting). Meaning that the ultimate result of AI automation could be to allow next-generation to train faster for lead advisory roles, to the extent that they can shift their focus to more impactful learning than can be achieved with manual tasks that can be automated with AI.

Ultimately, even though AI might change the shape of next-generation advisory roles in the future, the reality of the technology today is that even the most advanced AI tools can’t necessarily be relied on to perform as intended 100% of the time, meaning that at the very least much of the output needs a second pair of eyes to review it before it goes in front of a client or is used to kick off a workflow. And so for now, next-generation advisors will still have a role in ensuring the meeting preparation and follow-up processes are done properly – even if that means evaluating and signing off on an AI “assistant’s” output, rather than generating that output themselves.

The Portfolio Management Problem That Arises When “Large Cap” Companies Aren’t Really Large Cap

(Steven Ellis | Financial Advisor)

When advisors create asset allocation models for their clients’ portfolios, those models often break down along lines of asset class (e.g., equity or fixed income) and region (U.S., developed, or emerging markets), with equities further divided by size between large, medium, and small cap companies. Advisors who use passively managed funds like mutual funds and ETFs will then often assign funds to each of these asset categories that are designed to track an index that serves as a proxy for the category: For example, an S&P 500 index fund to fulfill the large cap allocation, and a Russell 2000 index fund to cover the small cap allocation.

However, shifts in the makeup of the U.S. equity markets over the last decade have many of the market indexes used as proxies for specific categories are no longer fully made up of companies that truly fit that category. For example, “large cap” companies (as defined by Morningstar) are those that make up the top 70% of U.S. market capitalization, with the next 20% being mid cap and the smallest 10% being small cap. However, the U.S. equity markets have become incredibly top-heavy in recent years, with the growth of the 10 or so largest companies far outpacing everyone else. Which means that, with fewer companies making up the bulk of the U.S. equity market, there are fewer companies that actually qualify as “large cap” – such that, while almost the entirety of the S&P 500 would have the large cap definition in 2010, only about 150 would actually be considered large cap today!

The upshot with these changes is that investors who allocate their portfolios based on index-tracking funds may actually be underweighting their large cap exposure, since indexes that have traditionally been considered to be purely large cap now actually have significant mid cap exposure. Conversely those same investors may be significantly overweight in their mid and small cap allocations. Which has mattered in recent years because the large cap stocks have significantly outperformed small cap stocks on the aggregate, meaning that those who have allocated their portfolio based on the market index tracked by each fund, rather than based on the funds’ underlying companies, have underperformed the market as a whole.

The key point is that as the proverbial goal posts shift around which companies are considered large, medium, or small cap, advisors who want to give their clients exposure to the full, cap-weighted equity market can do so by looking at the underlying holdings of the funds they allocate to, rather than simply using the index tracked by each fund as a proxy for their size. Which may be a more involved process than allocating funds based on their tracking index, but is more possible with portfolio analytics and rebalancing software that can view funds on a “look through” basis – and can ensure that the client’s asset allocation doesn’t present any hidden risks that can lead to more volatility than the client (and advisor) anticipated.

We’re Not In ‘The Mother of All Bubbles’, But U.S. Stocks Could Still Underperform

(Harry Mamaysky | QuantStreet Capital)

Since the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, the U.S. stock market has handily outperformed international markets: From 2008-2024 the S&P 500 returned an annualized 10.7%, while the MSCI EAFE (representing non-U.S. developed markets) returned just 3.3% per year, and the MSCI Emerging Markets index returned a mere 1.9%. The long period of U.S. outperformance has for one thing made it difficult for advisors who advocate for international diversification to protect against the single-country risk of investing in U.S. equities alone, but at the same time it has created speculation about whether – and when – the U.S. stock market is due for a correction. Especially since a good deal of the growth in the U.S. market has been driven not only by increased profitability of U.S. companies (although that has been a portion of it), but by higher stock prices relative to companies’ earnings (a phenomenon that has often led to a correction as P/E ratios tend to revert back towards their historical averages).

But it isn’t necessarily the case that U.S. equities are in a speculative bubble similar to the run-up to the 2000 dotcom crash or the 2008 financial crisis. For instance, investors could be pricing factors like more permissive U.S. regulatory regime and the U.S. government’s willingness to run higher deficits than its international counterparts, both of which can translate into more expected growth for U.S. companies. And even if the U.S. does revert back to its historical P/E levels, that doesn’t necessarily predict a crash: According to the authors’ simulations, it would lead to an average return of 4.27% for U.S. stocks over the next 10 years – well below the average long term historical return (which is closer to 10%), but also far from a “lost decade” of zero or negative returns like in the aftermath of the dotcom bubble.

By that same analysis, however, non-U.S. stocks (which have been trading below their historical P/E ratios) would return 8.47% per year over the next 10 years – over 4% higher than U.S. equities. And even if P/E ratios don’t fully revert to their historical averages, it would still take a combination of very high earnings growth in the U.S. and very low growth everywhere else for the U.S. to continue to outperform international equities in this scenario.

All of which doesn’t guarantee that the U.S. will underperform over the next 10 years – U.S. equities have been valued more highly than international for over 10 years, over which time the U.S. has nevertheless continued to outperform most international equities. However, it does show how high the bar is becoming for the U.S. to continue its current stretch of outperformance. And ultimately, it provides support, purely from a valuation perspective, for those who continue to believe that diversifying internationally is a key factor in reducing portfolio risk over the (very) long term.

Stocks Are More Expensive Than They Used to Be

(Michael Batnick | The Irrelevant Investor)

The Cyclically-Adjusted Price-to-Earnings (CAPE) ratio was developed in the 1990s by economist Robert Shiller as a way to gauge whether a company’s stock (or the stock market as a whole) is relatively expensive or inexpensive compared to its earnings history. After reviewing over 100 years of historical CAPE ratios for the S&P 500, Shiller found that the ratio tended to revert to the mean over the long term, meaning that when prices became overly expensive, they tended to endure a period of decline; similarly, when they became overly inexpensive, they would tend to appreciate in price. Notably, this predictive power of the CAPE ratio was most effective over long-term (10-20 year) periods, meaning that a high CAPE ratio doesn’t necessarily signal an imminent market decline – it just implies that investors should expect lower-than-average returns over the next 10-20 years.

The theory behind the CAPE ratio was seemingly reinforced by two events following its introduction: The 2000 dotcom crash, and the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, both of which saw the CAPE ratio spike as investors pushed stock prices up to higher and higher levels – followed by a steep correction as the bubbles collapsed on themselves. However, since then the CAPE ratio has again marched steadily upwards, from a low of around 13 when the market bottomed out in 2009 to up over 36 today. The nearly-uninterrupted bull market has lasted so long that it’s been more than a decade since speculators (including Shiller himself) first began to wonder whether the increasingly elevated CAPE ratio foretells a coming correction in the markets - and since then, the U.S. markets have continued to post higher-than-average returns in defiance of what we should have expected according to Shiller's research.

But while the ongoing increase in the CAPE ratio could signal that investors are again becoming irrationally optimistic about the performance of U.S. equities going forward, another theory is that the earnings growth prospects for U.S. companies have simply changed for the better to support a modern CAPE ratio that’s higher than its historical average. The transition of much of the economy from manufacturing to technology – with higher profit margins and more safeguards against competition – could have something to do with it, as well as the trends towards lower taxes and deregulation that have taken place since the 1980s.

Still, even for those who believe that the baseline expectations for a “normal” CAPE ratio should be raised to account for the current economic reality, it’s hard to completely ignore just how high stock prices are today compared to even their 21^st-century norms. Save for a brief period in 2021 during the rapid recovery from COVID, today’s CAPE ratio is the highest it’s been since the runup to the 2000 dotcom bubble. So while it’s still unwise to try to predict an imminent stock market crash based on the CAPE ratio alone, it also seems fair to assume that the S&P 500 won’t return over 15% per year on average going forward as it did from 2009-2024 (although as the history of the CAPE ratio shows, it could take many years for that prediction to play out in the end).

Should Adults Nap?

(Emily Oster | ParentData)

Modern life isn’t set up for adults to take naps. In most cases, people stop napping by the time they start kindergarten, and from then on – first in school, and later in the workplace – there’s no time built into the day to lay down and close one’s eyes. And while there’s occasionally some time to sneak a nap on the weekends (good luck with that for anyone with kids who've stopped napping themselves), that still only provides at most a couple of days each week to catch up on rest.

The question of whether it’s a good idea for adults to nap during the day has been the subject of debate and scholarly research. Some studies have shown that naps can improve adults’ alertness and cognitive performance (with shorter naps providing a quick burst of energy which fades relatively quickly, and longer naps taking longer for their effects to kick in but providing a more sustained energy boost later on). However, the findings on the long-term health effects of regular napping are more mixed, with some studies suggesting a higher likelihood of cardiovascular disease among regular nappers (although this might just be a matter of people who are already less healthy being more inclined to nap regularly, rather than the naps themselves making people unhealthy). And of course, any time spent napping might equate to time not spent being productive in other ways – and although the energy boost from napping might make some people more productive during their waking hours, that might not be enough to make up for the lost productivity when they’re asleep.

The bottom line is that, while the data shows that on the aggregate naps can help people feel better and more energetic, and at the very least they don’t amount to totally lost time since the loss of productivity during the nap is made up in part by a boost in productivity afterwards, the impact of napping varies a lot from person to person. Some people (including this author, who is an unabashed fan of napping) find a 15-20 minute nap in the early afternoon to be a great way to recharge before jumping in to tackle the rest of the day. Others often find themselves waking up more tired than they had been before the naps, and unable to shake off that drowsy feeling for the rest of the day. But for those who do benefit from naps (and are lucky enough to have a quiet place to close their eyes during the day), the key point is to plan the right time to take it, when the benefits of the subsequent productivity boost will be greatest (but when the nap itself won’t cut too much into productivity).

We Didn't Evolve to Exercise

(Simplavida)

Although humans today are biologically identical to the ones that existed over 100,000 years ago, our lifestyles today could not be more distant from those of our ancient ancestors. Our bodies and brains evolved to adapt to the hunter-gatherer lifestyles of early modern humans, where large amounts of energy were needed for hunting, looking for food and water, escaping predators, and traveling on foot across continents to find areas where resources were more abundant. And so our bodies came to prioritize rest and consuming calories to build up and conserve our energy (i.e., fat) reserves to keep ourselves alive in a resource-scarce environment.

Today, of course, our food resources are anything but scarce, and most peoples’ lifestyles no longer feature the constant movement that was once necessary for our ancestors to survive. This has created an imbalance in how our bodies acquire and use energy: Even though we have more than enough to eat and, in many cases, have jobs that require expending little physical effort, our bodies still tell us to avoid using any more energy than what's necessary to find food and escape from danger.

Which could go a long way towards explaining why so many people find it difficult to get into routine of regular physical activity: It isn’t a moral failing of being lazy or intentionally self-destructive; instead, it’s that millennia of evolution has baked into our psyche the instinct to avoid expending extra energy – or put more simply, we’re constantly fighting our own ancient brains to stay as active as we need to keep our modern bodies healthy.

All that isn’t to say that we need to replicate the lives of early modern humans to keep ourselves healthy today: Our lives are undoubtedly better due to the existence of agriculture, permanent shelter, and a lack of saber-tooth cats prowling in the underbrush. But for those who find it difficult to exercise for its own sake, it can be worth thinking about how to incorporate more activity into daily life: For example, parking farther away from the entrances of stores (or forgoing the car ride entirely in favor of walking, biking, or taking public transit). Finding active hobbies, like gardening, walking clubs, or recreational sports leagues can also create more physical activity that doesn’t feel as engineered as a standalone workout. And even during work, doing walk-and-talk meetings or using a standing workstation can break up the long interludes of sitting and make it easier to stay healthy while doing a non-physical job.

The point is that although some people truly get joy out of exercising for its own sake, not everyone gets that same feeling from going to the gym or going for a run. But when it’s possible to get the benefits of physical activity as a side effect of activities that really do make you happy – or to simply incorporate more activity in the things you already do on a day to day basis – it may not be necessary to grind through workouts for their own sake in order to keep your body in shape.

Don’t Let Daylight Savings Time Ruin Your Sleep

(Alice Callahan | New York Times)

This Sunday most Americans are going through the annual ritual of resetting our clocks forward by one hour to account for the start of Daylight Savings Time. And while the start of this season can be a welcome change as it comes along with the start of warmer spring weather, growing plants, and more sunlight, the time adjustment can be tricky to handle in the short term. Even though it’s only a one-hour time change, shifting our entire schedule forward can have an effect similar to jet lag, making it harder to go to sleep at night and harder to wake up in the morning, and it can take a week or longer for our bodies and minds to fully adjust.

Although there are few ways to avoid the Daylight Savings Time shift (other than moving to a different country or a state like Arizona that doesn’t observe Daylight Savings Time), there are ways that people can prepare and adjust their routines to minimize the negative effects of moving the clock forward. For instance, rather than try to make the change all at once, people can adjust their schedules more gradually over a multiday period (e.g., moving meals and bedtimes up in 15-minute intervals over four days). People can also plan daytime activities for after the change on Sunday that will leave them tired enough to fall asleep easier on Sunday night. And in general, it’s a good time to prioritize practices that will improve sleep quality, like avoiding caffeine, alcohol, and screen time in the evenings, to improve the chances of feeling well rested on Monday morning.

In the end, although the shift to Daylight Savings Time can be a hard one (particularly for those with pets and kids for whom the change in routine can be even more disruptive), we can at least take some comfort in the knowledge that almost everyone we know is going through the same adjustment. So it’s an even better idea than usual to remember to be kind to ourselves, and to others – and to remember that after a long winter, spring is finally (almost) here!

---

We hope you enjoyed the reading! Please leave a comment below to share your thoughts, or make a suggestion of any articles you think we should highlight in a future column!

In the meantime, if you're interested in more news and information regarding advisor technology, we'd highly recommend checking out Craig Iskowitz's "Wealth Management Today" blog.