1) What

First off, if you get the reference for the title of this article, you are in the right spot. Anyways, here we go:

Hey everyone! My name’s Cliff Cornell! I am a 24-year-old CFP® Professional and associate financial advisor at Bone Fide Wealth. Welcome to my weekly newsletter, Yield to Maturity!

If you’re like me, you finished undergrad in the midst of a pandemic. Fast forward, you’re now a ‘real person’ working a 9-5, growing a business or even pursuing postgraduate studies. What the hell is even that? Robbed of my last year and a half of ‘in-person’ (a term that is now used regularly) undergraduate studies, I was out to fend for myself. Learning how to learn via Zoom; no easy task when the digital world was right beside my professor who was on a tangent about posting margin when you get on the wrong side of a wheat futures contract. The pandemic marked the start of a new, even more digital world. In person connections were few and far between for literal years. 

Now we’re here. Who knows what happened from March 2020 to now. We overcame a pandemic, monetary policy flipped from incredible easing to one of the most dramatic tightening sequences in history, we figured out how to work from home, and some of us even assimilated back to in-person work. When you take a step back, it is kind of incredible. 

It is worth reflecting on how much we have overcome in the past 3 years. For one, we as young adults have somehow, someway wedged ourselves into the professional world. We learned how to not only finish our degrees online but to build our careers over Zoom. As awkward as it may have been, as humbling a 9am Zoom call in your pajamas was, as lonely as sitting in a room by yourself for 9 hours a day was, we did it. This pandemic is likely a defining period of time in everyone’s life. However, for now young professionals it has impacted us on a magnitude of levels. Our resiliency shows in hindsight.

The whole point of reflecting on such a monumental event here is to diminish the uncertainty we feel on a daily basis. As time goes on, we reflect on these events as just ‘things that happened’. We worked through them; we played the cards we were dealt. I genuinely think that the pandemic was a wealth of knowledge for people our age. Given I am a financial professional, there are two main ways in which I think this negative event had a positive impact on people’s mindset. 

Delayed gratification. This was somewhat forced during the pandemic. We couldn’t see our friends; we couldn’t go out to eat and we couldn’t attend in-person events associated with a large crowd. However, seeing our friends for the first time was a sense of delayed gratification. The weekly lunches, the coffee runs, the late nights at a bar with our friends ultimately were taken for granted prior to the pandemic and what a treat it was when we finally got to do those things again.

Young professionals now have a great sense of what delayed gratification feels like. This is constantly applied in investing. You are foregoing spending your current dollars for a future goal, which can be incredibly hard to do at times. While it may not be a perfect comparison, delayed gratification was something we all felt as the pandemic winded down and we got back to normal life. 

Experience with meaningful uncertainty. The beginning of the pandemic was no doubt one of the most stressful periods of time we ever endured. We had no clue what was going on, we watched the news in fear until the country was ultimately shut down completely. I bet most would struggle to name another time they were more uncertain than they were at the beginning of the pandemic. Let me be frank, I am not trying to say the pandemic was a good thing by any stretch of the imagination, I am simply trying to find any potential for positives by reflecting on it.

Our whole lives will be full of uncertainty, for better or worse. However, now we have dealt with it in a meaningful capacity early on in our journey. This is a cornerstone of being a sound investor. Learning to tune out the day-to-day doom and gloom that is projected upon us through the media we consume, knowing we will come out okay in the end is nearly an invaluable ability. The most prudent investors will tell you that buying and holding is the key to outsized returns. We shouldn’t fall victim to short-term uncertainty when we are focused on long-term goals. 

So yeah, welcome to my newsletter. I hope you view this piece in the most positive, upbeat way possible. We are young, we’re figuring it out as we go along. So is everyone else! No one has it figured out the way they may portray on social media. A saying as old as time in finance is, “When in doubt, zoom out.” We can apply this to our everyday lives, taking some time to reflect on how far we’ve come, the obstacles we have dove under and jumped over and how it ultimately led us to where we are now. In the future, I’ll be more focused on young professionals and the financial matters that impact them the most. It just felt right to start off by addressing the elephant in the room.

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