Food for thought How
Food for thought How sustainable are your client’s financial plans? Few in the know would debate that Jeffreys Bay has the best righthand break wave in the world. It is a surfing mecca. Pilgrims journey there from everywhere, all year round. It hosts the annual international World Surf League event, the J-Bay Open. My family are not surfers, but we appreciate the remarkable athleticism on display. At the end of a recent holiday we had a night’s stopover in Jeffreys Bay on our way home. We hoped to see some of the world’s best athletes preparing for the annual event. But just like investment markets, the surf is not always up. We didn’t see much surfing. We did manage to have a meal at the aptly named Kitchen Windows restaurant, which takes its name from the beach it overlooks. Local folklore has it that before Jeffreys Bay became a strip mall miraculously transplanted from Midwest America, local surfers would look out their rustic “kitchen windows” to see if the surf was up. Without adjusting our heads, we could read the menu and watch the surf, what little there was of it. It turns out this was not the only thing in short supply. Not everything on the menu was available that night. No line fish. In fact our waiter said there is seldom freshly caught line fish these days. And the calamari? It was from Patagonia. From our table, we could see the “chokka” boats out at sea fishing for calamari. We asked the obvious question. Why no local calamari? “No, that’s too tough and chewy. It gets exported,” our waiter explained. There we were, watching about twenty fishing boats hard at work, but there was only one local fish, hake, on a menu topped and tailed by Patagonian calamari and Norwegian salmon. We scratched our heads. Literally and figuratively. We were “haked out” after 10 days on the South African Wild Coast and wanted to spoil ourselves with something different on the last night of our trip. Little did we think that we would face an ethical dilemma in our menu choice. Behavioural guru Dan Ariely says that with most ethical dilemmas, as long as you can 16 www.bluechipjournal.co.za
SUSTAINABILITY rationalise your decision you are okay. Our thinking exactly. The planes had already offloaded their CO2 to bring the calamari and salmon to our shores. My wife and I were desperate for some calamari, and Patagonia is closer to South Africa than Norway. Less damage done. We reassured ourselves. The calamari was delicious. But we did feel a little guilty. Despite what Donald Trump says, our world is in a climate change crisis. Polar caps are melting. Certain areas of India are becoming uninhabitable because of the heat. Our seas are filling up with plastic. Africa is increasingly water scarce. Human behaviour impacts every biological process and species. Life as we know it is not sustainable. The need for us to change our behaviour is irrefutable. Yet we ate the Patagonian calamari. Such a simple and seemingly innocent act. But it perpetuates the problem for at least one more sitting at Kitchen Windows. Supply meets demand. To divert my guilt, I wondered about the menus financial planners put in front of their clients. At its essence, financial planning is a process of helping clients meet their life and financial goals. A recent Harvard Business Review paper suggests that “leaving a legacy” is a key goal that financial planners' clients want to achieve. So financial planners are in the game of helping clients achieve sustainable financial futures. Now it’s not quite sustainable fishing, but it begs the question, to what extent is the concept of sustainability addressed in the menus offered to clients? Standard financial planning menus include items such as a financial needs analysis; a risk analysis and plan; an investment plan; an estate plan; help with budgeting and managing debt. The menu may also include life planning items, such as a client’s history with money, transitions they are facing, their life goals, and of course their legacy. These are all great and necessary. But if climate change destroys life as we know it, then these menus will be to no avail. Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old climate change activist, refuses to fly. She believes the impact on the environment is too severe. When she spoke at Davos recently, she took a 32-hour train journey to get there. Thunberg has energised the global climate change movement, particularly among the youth. She shows the power of individual action. Financial planners work with individuals every day. What impact can they have? Profound, I think. Imagine a financial planning menu that had a section on sustainable living. How are you recycling at home? What measures are you taking to reduce your energy and water consumption? How do you travel? Perhaps if we all had an individual sustainability plan in place, we wouldn’t need to rationalise eating Patagonian calamari. Guilty as charged. I’m sure no financial planner wants a world where their own or their clients’ children or grandchildren can no longer eat fish, have enough water, heating or clean air. Perhaps our contribution to a sustainable future for the world is to ensure that clients plan for such a future on an individual basis. A sustainable future does not mean one without fun or enjoyment. I, for one, want to go back to Kitchen Windows and preferably eat locally-caught calamari. And definitely to have the deconstructed cheesecake. To coin that well-known culinary term, “It’s to die for.” • Rob Macdonald, Head of Strategic Advisory Services, Fundhouse www.bluechipjournal.co.za 17
